Advanced Live Game Seek Features

Dear Chess.com Staff, Members, and Community,

I want to first apologize for posting about cheating in this forum, I should have read the guidelines fully and I am sorry for taking up your time!

Discussing the issues I was concerned about in the Cheating Forum club, an interesting suggestion was made concerning Live game seeks that I think would be interesting to add to help customize the seek experience to one's own liking.

The ideas are simple:

01. Premium members can have an option to seek games in the Custom Challenge tab with other premium members only. This can help empower the community of paid members.

02. Players can choose to seek games with players who have played a minimum of x (user definable) amount of games in the given time control (bullet, blitz, or rapid) in the Custom Challenge tab. This can help ensure a certain level of experience on / commitment to the site for those wishing to challenge similarly experienced players.

03. Players can choose to challenge other players to a match in the Custom Challenge tab (2/3, 3/5, 4/7, tie-breaks options, etc.). This would be an interesting way for 2 players to commit to a match. If a player goes through with the match, they are awarded points as usual, and if a player forfeits, they lose however many games they would have played at minimum. (ex: I played 1 game of a 3/5 match. I lost my first game, then forfeited. I lost points amounting to 3 games total). Changes to the way scores are shown for a match could be 1/5 vs 0/5, 1/5 vs 1/5, 1.5/5 vs 1.5/5, etc. I think this would be especially interesting for titled player matches in the Events tab of Live Chess, but also for most lower rated players who tend to play only 1 game at a time rather than matches.

I am very much interested in your thoughts!

Chris (RolloOrollo)

I like this idea.

The fact that it could encourage more people to buy a premium membership should make chess.com like it too.

Features 1 and 2 are ok I guess. Overall not a big appeal (some peace of mind vs cheaters), but also not a big downside (the downside is splintering the player pool). But there's also a mild benefit for chess.com in that longer time controls (or the site in general) may be more popular (if people are less afraid of cheaters).

Feature 3 is something I imagine a lot of people would actually pay for though. Forced mini matches agreed to before the first game starts have always seemed like a fun idea to me.

hi, I like N2

thanks,

VT

Hey guys, thanks for your feedback  I agree stiggling, it's definitely bound to make premium membership more worthwhile, and also allow players to ensure they are matched with an opponent who is equally dedicated to improvement. I'm very much looking forward to the thoughts of the chess.com staff and further suggestions from the community that could help customize/improve seeks!

Premium members are already protected from new members who haven't played a certain number of games.  I'm not sure what the exact limit is or if the limit is reduced if a match isn't found quickly, though.

In daily, premium members do have a filter to only play against other premium members.  The same filter might be nice in live chess, but might sometimes result in lengthy waits for find an opponent, particularly if you're playing one of the less common time controls.

Interesting.

I see your point, however I prefer to be sure that I'm playing an experienced opponent. I've often been paired with players who've only played 20 games total. That being said, some additional one-sided filters would definitely help improve the seek experience as not both players would need to input seek criteria (other than time control) to be paired. Longer wait times is fine by me!

but despite the cheaters , shouldn't u still be climbing? 

I think so, but above all I think that climbing higher and training harder come hand in hand. To improve and face higher rated opponents, you have to train on many fronts (learning new opening ideas, lessons on positional play, learning to identify the position's strengths and weaknesses, tactics training, and finally, practicing what you've learned against equally and higher rated opponents). The new interactive Lessons on chess.com are very handy

Hi RolloOrollo,
Fully support ideas 1 and 2. Although, which level of membership are you specifying for in terms of "premium" members? As a diamond member, do you want to find gold, platinum or diamond members only? Or diamond members can play with any of these three membership categories?

I was thinking that paid members can have a separate pool, so you could simply turn on or off a switch when customizing your seek, without discrimination against different tiers. I just think it would add an element of exclusivity to being a paid member, which benefits the paid user and chess.com as well (even more incentive to have a paid membership). It wouldn't really disrupt seeks in general as it would be off by default I would imagine, and only the picky like myself would be prone to leaving it on.

That already exists in daily.

Yes, would be nice to have it in live as well