WHAT?! LIVE IS GONE

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

what r live features I don't even know that XD

I dont understand what im looking at.... im dumb

There are currently two live chess interfaces:

"play > live chess": the original live chess interface which will be phased out later this year

"play > play": the newer live chess interface which will replace "play > live chess"

Yes, I came back to play a game tonight for the first time since early June.  Figured I'd try the new interface, whatever that is..........  WHAT??? I'm paired with the black pieces and there's no way I can flip the board?????  )(*&%$)*%) )%*$)%*$   Of all the things to launch the app without... can't swap the board around so the pieces I'm playing are in front of me (well, playing up the board intuitively.)

Two thumbs down for the premature launch of the new game interface. 

Are you playing on the website?

If yes, there is a button near the top-right corner of the board with two arrows. It flips the board. You can also type the letter 'x' to flip the board.

If you're playing the black pieces and the game starts with white at the bottom of the board, then you might have turned on the setting "White Always on Bottom".

What is "Play" ?  (Why we ever got on this marketing trend of single-word descriptive terms for products or services is beyond me, but I guess the average IQ of a human being means we can only ever remember single words at a time.)

How is that different from "Live"?

Why is there now a tertiary game clock that Auto-Resigns inside of 15 seconds?!?!  Why do we have game clocks if every move is now 15 seconds?

What flunkee of UI/UX Design school drew up this new interface?  In Live Chess, as soon as a game was finished, ONE BUTTON push brought up an Analysis Report of the game just finished.  Now, 3-4 clicks are required.  It is no longer trivial to see the MATCH Clock.  New Games were seemless in the LIVE version, the PLAY version is hardly seemless.

• Previous V2 Live UX/UI design score: 9.8 out of 10.
• V3 Live UX/UI design score: 7.5 out of 10.
• Play UX/UI design score: 2.2 out of 10.

I'll add an update to my opinion above since I did learn some new stuff today.  

I asked a friend to join in an unrated game with me just to experiment with the new interface.   I initiated the "Challenge", I was in Play, he was still in Live.  I was on my work PC where I have never played from.  It's a more conventional PC, but same browser I use at home, Windows 7, and a monitor in a standard configuration. (more on that later). 

Observations:

He NEVER got the dialog box asking if he wanted to use "Play", and it never opened it for him.  He always used the old interface.  We both closed our browsers and got back on, in every case it always put him in "Live".   In my case, I got the message about play for what I'll guess was the 6th or 7th time.  Each time, I used the X to close the dialog box and use Live.  On the third time in this afternoon, it decided to stop asking me if I wanted to use 'Play", and I guess now I'm stuck with it from now on.  I no longer get the dialog to make the choice.  (Ps, I'm fine with that now).

On my system at work, the "Play" javascript app worked fine today.   My system there has a 1920x1080 monitor in landscape.  So the browser window is generally going to be wider than tall.  The site and JS app displays fine on that.

At home, I have 2-32" 4K Monitors mounted on a stand in portrait mode (standing up tall, sideways to some folks).  So, each monitor is 2160 wide by 3840 high.  For most tihngs, it just means you can fit more things on the screen, see longer pages all at once, etc.  Here, unfortunately, the site doesn't appear to like it when the browser window is taller than wide.  At no point the other day when I was resizing my browser window, did I make the window wider than tall.   Or, not by a margin enough to correct this little error.  If you make your window narrow to where the challenge dialogs are moved down below the chess board instead of being to the right, many buttons no longer appear on the display.   This includes the flip board button, the settings button, some other button up there that I have no idea what it does, and then down below, there's another button for expanding to full screen or whatever, that's gone too.   

The trouble appears to be that the developers made the site scale the chess board and challenge dialogs with the height to width ratio of the browser window.  Probably assuming (as you'd expect) that most displays are indeed wider than tall.   Or even if they are wider than tall, nobody will ever play with a window that's narrower than about 2/3rds of the screen.   Not the case when you have monitors in portrait mode.  It's almost impossible for me to do that on my system, since the window would be less than 1/8th of my desktop real estate.  It's just counterintuitive. 

So from now on I'll just stretch the browser window across 2 monitors and make it a little shorter to fool the site into scaling the site differently.  No big deal.  When I do that my buttons reappear.  

Even today, I was sure the site was acting differently than it did when I typed my original post above.   Now that  I'm home and looking at it again, I'm convinced it's being worked on constantly.  Even now, Sunday night at 9pm, it's acting differently than it did today at work at just past noon.   For instance, I'll supply 3 screenshots from my PC to illustrate what I'm talking about.  The scaling today was different than last night.  And the scaling now is different from earlier today.  

Be forewarned, I'm posting these actual size as screencaps, so they're pretty big.  I hope they scale on the forum so folks don't have to scroll around the images...

In the screenshots, just ignore the right hand screen in the later pics.  It's showing the images  on the right monitor being edited, so those are pictures of the screenshots... lol.

Ok, first one shows what happens now.  If the window is narrow, the challenge dialogs move down the page and the settings icon, full screen icon, flip board icon, and something else I don't know what it does, all disappear.   That's shown in the first screencap.  There is no windows area to the right of the board with the settings and flip buttons.  

Second screencap shows what happens if I make the window wider.  This is different than last night insofar as the challenge section is way skinnier than it was last night.  I'd say last night, it was as wide as the playing board.  Equal split at 50/50.  Today, it appears to be about 30% of the window width so the board is larger, the challenge buttons much smaller (and better).  So, that is changing what I see today vs what I could see yesterday.   No matter what I did yesterday, the flip button wasn't there.

Third screenshot is what I'm saying I'll do from now on, where the window need to be wider than just one monitor to make the board larger, but put the challenge dialogs on the right monitor and the board on the left.    

Today when I opened this, when my window was sized correctly and the area containing the buttons was visible, The only time the buttons appeared was when I hovered the mouse in that tiny narrow area under the settings icon.  The settings icon was always there, but the full screen and flip icons were not there till you hovered over them.  Now, as shown in the 2nd and 3rd screenshots, All the 4 buttons at the top are there (To the right of the black players clock) , but down at the very bottom of that strip there's one more icon/button that only appears when you hover  the mouse over that area.  I don't have it shown in these screenshots, but it will appear beside the white players clock (just to the right of it).  

Then last but not least, manekapa asked above if I had "White always on bottom" set in the options.  I wasn't aware there were options and I hated that so I never would have done it, but yes, evidently it was set up as a default for me when I joined the site because it was definitely on.  

So, Yes it does work. No, it doesn't work for everyone, but 99% of people it should work fine for.  I also agree with Spacebux about the timer for the first moves.  Ok, let's give 1 minute or 2 for the first move, and then move on.  But today I was on the phone with my friend trying to figure this out and he was getting messages that I will auto-resign in X seconds, but I wasn't getting them!  Had I not been on the phone with him telling me to make a move quick, I would have been resigned without ever knowing about it.  

Fyi, I watched a video of Agamator's the other day and there was a person in a candidates tournament who took something like 10 minutes to make the opening move.   Now, if people who are battling for the world chess champion title can take a few extra minutes of their duly allotted clock time, why can't I ???  Lol.   Furthermore, if you're going to pop up dialogs for someone telling about auto-resignations, how about telling the person you're going to penalize.  The opponent has nothing to do with it, why tell them?  

The Auto-Resign pop-up has to the WORST design flaw of all of them -- and that's a CODING decision chess.com staff made.  It's inexcusable.  Someone needs to be removed from the Development Team for that utterly asinine decision.

Seriously - what's the point of even having a Game in 3-minutes or 10-minutes or 30-minutes when the Auto-Resign function is ready to call it in 15 seconds?!?!

Anyone else ever have to use the restroom mid-game?  If it's on my 10-minute clock, it's on me.  If my opponent does it, it's on him/her. 

Chess.com made a poor, poor decision once more to interject themselves with a new TIME construct all on their own.

I think the auto resign only affects the first two moves, so you simply have to start the game,. And it is now set to 1 minute instead of the 15 seconds it was.

A step in the right direction, but I tend to agree with the poster above that it is unnecessary. And especially for exactly the reason mentioned. I've done that myself when someone offers a challenge and I accept. I do generally say in the chat BRB and make sure they know I'm taking a small break.

For me, it was EVERY MOVE in my games.  A complete disaster of a code concept.

Yea, that would be bad... :lol:

What should have been done was to offer a dialog box with a straightforward statement to the effect that you are welcome to beta test our new interface we are working on and offer feedback. They would have gotten loads of good information from people who would have known in advance to expect the unexpected.

Chess.com does not have a sufficient sand-box to play-test ideas before rolling them out into production.   Hence the hard-lessons of increased competition from other sites.

Live Chess has an analysis board under the Variants Tab while Play doesn't have an analysis board.

For now, you can always go out to your home screen and on your list of games, pull up the analysis there. It's not like you need it while you're playing the game.  That's a small thing.  I am guessing they'll get the analysis code hooked up to "Play" sometime in the near future.   They definitely had a few problems early on, but I can't see anything that causes an issue any more.  The few small differences are no big deal.  At least not from what I have noticed. 

Interesting thread.

The only thing I don't like or that is wrong with "Play" is, when I play Bughouse, the pieces don't show up on the board when I drop them on. Plus, King of the Hill, if I pre-move at the very start, it won't come up, so I have to refresh the page. 

Are you still not forced to move within 15 seconds in Play?