Hello 4 Player Chess fans and veterans!

Based on a lot of feedback received in the past few years, we admit that the starting position chosen as a new default 2 years ago during the Merge has significant issues that negatively impact the opening variety and the overall game experience. We're excited to announce the 4PC Festival and put as much effort as possible to organize a comprehensive testing of potential alternative 4PC setups.

The Backstory

Since 4 player chess was first introduced on chess.com, all the kings initially lived on the light squares. But there were several issues in both Teams and FFA related to the balance of the game, such as Blue and Green were better positionally while Red and Yellow had a tactical advantage, which led to Red and Yellow being easier to play whilst Blue and Green required more precision to maintain equality, and thus, to an unequal win/lose ratio (see stats, see engine eval).

Given regular complaints coming from new players, who have not yet learned all the openings and lines to have enough self-defense, and a desire of higher-rated players to improve and balance the game, the former admin team decided to consider alternative starting positions of 4PC, and the first candidate was Omatamix setup (with Blue and Green kings placed on the dark squares instead) first proposed in October 2019 and then actively discussed during 2021. At the end of the year it was announced that the Omatamix position will likely become the standard position of 4 Player Chess, and so several 1-month long tournaments were organized in order to gather feedback from the community.

Many liked the new position, some did not. With the sudden appearance of many alternative 4PC positions (BSRTI, BSRTI-Invented) things became quite messy, the opinions went back and forth; the 4PC 2.0 release date was quite close and there were time constraints related to it. Thus, after many internal discussions by the admin team and their voting process, it was decided to not interrupt the ongoing at that time tournaments of Omatamix position with another alternative setup.

The overall feedback on the Omatamix setup seemed quite positive, except for several high-rated players expressing their concerns about losing the opening theory that had been explored for many years or being strongly against switching to the new setup in general. Their arguments, however, were not convincing to the former admin team, who believed that it's a matter of habit, not liking any changes, and that losing the opening theory is okay because a new one will be developed shortly for the new setup. The huge 4PC platform update was about to be released (aka the release of Variants), and it would attract a lot of new players never having played 4PC before. Changing the starting position to a very balanced one and starting a new period of "better" 4PC on a new bigger platform did make sense.

Was it a mistake? Yes.

Once the Variants platform was released (the event is further called merge), the servers were very unstable. Endless disconnects and lags, many bugs, weird new UI with awkward navigation, and so many other things that negatively impacted 4PC players and their user experience, especially after moving away from a comfortable and well-explored 4PC-targeted app. The starting position change was too hasty. More time should have been dedicated. More alternatives should have been considered. And finally, releasing many updates at once made a synergistic negative effect. We acknowledge this, we learned from it, and we’ll do our best to never let it happen again.

Why the change was not reverted?

This is a quite common question being asked, why the change wasn’t reverted as soon as there we a lot of negative feedback received about it, from high-rated and well-respected players included? The position of the former admin team can be expressed in the following single quote:

“

What a mess this has become. You know what divides a collective of enthusiasts? Giving legitimacy to multiple factions, then flip-flopping and reversing course; Swaying the official platform back and forth within a timeframe which is comically too short for anyone to acclimate.

If you say you're taking a certain direction, stick with it. If it turns out in a bad way, given enough time for a fair consideration by all sides, then consider alternatives. Don't immediately roll back your changes just because a few people threaten to boycott, or protest.

It’s worth mentioning, however, that despite the negative feedback from multiple high-rated players, we received plenty of positive ones. And the more time passed since the merge, the stronger the reasons became to not revert the changes. Several high-rated players who first were against the new setup and were boycotting it, later started playing and discovered that it actually has its own positive sides.

In the middle of 2023, an official anonymous poll was created for middle- and high-rated 4PC players on Variants. So far, this is the only poll with the number of participants being over 1000, which given over 1.5 million unique users having played 4PC last year in total makes it the only one that most accurately describes the current state of opinions around setups.

The story behind dead 4PC

Since the merge, we’ve endlessly seen players claiming and mentioning that 4PC is dying. So is it dead already? Certainly, yes. Some may say. But despite that, we’ve made a comprehensive analysis of the current state of 4PC activity, and the numbers prove that it’s not only alive but also was never really dying! Then why would it look like it did?

Because it’s “dying” from March to November every year. It’s a seasonal behavior that can be seen on the chart below:

The merge has certainly affected the decline of the number of weekly games played. The number of games literally dropped by 3 times in the first 3 months. This is what caused a feeling of 4PC dying. However, the merge did not trigger the decline itself, it only made it more rapid and drastic. That said, we can also see that while there is a general slight decline of games in Teams, FFA has been pretty much growing in popularity once recovered from the seasonal decline in 2022.

The number of weekly active players remained almost untouched and more than recovered by December 2022.

Solving the Dilemma

It’s been a tough time for all of us. But things have got a lot better. There are no longer lags and endless server disconnects that we used to have. We've got a monitoring system and advanced tools for gathering statistics we can now use for important decision making. Chess.com has now paid more attention to Variants organizing amazing Community Events that attract more players to join Variants, where 4PC is still the variant #1. And the chaos around 4PC setups has now settled down a little, so we’re ready to move on.

We've changed the standard position once, we don't want to do it in the same way again, whether it is Old setup or BY setup. What we want is:

Make Old Standard more visible and officially supported. Motivate players and creators who stopped playing 4PC because it's been dropped to play again. Encourage playing Old Standard again, not with a collapsed "Old setup" button.
Do no force old players to switch to and keep playing New Standard (which was the main course we’ve had since the merge).
Support and encourage testing and exploring alternative setups in an organized way.

Equalizing setups

As seen from the poll results above, the opinions are currently divided roughly in half.

Instead of forcefully trying to unite two player bases, we’ll now encourage the split in half. We can't come up with a setup that looks exactly like old setup for ones, and exactly like new setup for others. It will be a completely different setup that looks like neither of them.

So we won't make another setup switch. Instead, we’ll put all potential setups as separate and equal options for players to choose. Then, having the setups "equalized", we will go through testing each of them, supporting this process by active events. After that, we will gather feedback, game statistics, application responses, and votes from all the participants. If all of that will be enough to define a new standard starting position of 4 Player Chess (we obviously need one) for the next 10-20 years, we’ll do it. If not, we’ll continue investigation and active discussions, considering other alternatives if needed.

Obviously, having multiple "equally important" starting positions might create more confusion for users and split the 4PC community even further that isn't just big enough for that. This may lead to even longer wait times for a game to start which is still a real issue nowadays. Therefore, we’re making several UI updates to enhance the user experience of trying, exploring, and playing different setups. We're including detailed, but concise and useful descriptions for all the potential setups, and will alternate the active setup each month, advertising it over others. We believe that these steps along with advertising events around it, support by content creators, and old players getting back to playing 4PC more actively, have all the potential to compensate the split consequences. At the same time, we will keep monitoring and publishing stats on this every week, and be ready to proactively make decisions based on community feedback and the data we receive.

The Festival

We are excited to announce the 4PC Festival, a series of events that will last for 6 months and are meant to provide an environment for all players to thoroughly test the alternative setups of 4PC.

Each month (June, July, August, September, October) a specific setup will be chosen to be active during the month. A set of casual arenas will be organized during each month to explore the active setup and 6 qualifiers will take place on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday in the last 2 weeks of each month.

The Festival will be split into two parts: FFA and Teams; both events will run simultaneously and have their own individual finals and semifinals. The casual Teams arenas will have a regular format where you can explore a potential 4PC setup with your teammate together, but the qualifiers and the finals will be Self-Partner.

We want to focus on the quality and the coverage of the testing we provide, so all arenas, including the qualifiers, will cover different time controls: 1|7, 4min, 1|1 for FFA and 1|15D, 4min, 2|1 for Teams. The variety of different time controls will be further expanded in finals!

The winners of the FFA qualifiers and an additional best-performed player within all FFA qualifying arenas will be invited to participate in the FFA Semifinals. Similarly, the winners of the Teams qualifiers and the best-performed player within all Teams qualifying arenas will be invited to participate in the Teams Semifinals.

In November, the great battle will be organized between the winners of the qualifiers with a total cash prize fund of $2000! All five different starting positions will be tested inside and out in a competitive style under all of the different time controls in both semifinals and finals of both FFA and Teams.

Prizes

Each qualifying arena offers the following prizes:

1st place: 3-month Diamond Membership (+ qualify to the Semifinals)
2nd place: 2-month Diamond Membership
3rd place: 1-month Diamond Membership

The Finals offer the following prizes:

1st place: $500
2st place: $250
3rd place: $150
4th place: $100

Learn more about schedule and regulations here.

Setups

The Festival will feature 5 different setups in the following order:

Modern (the current setup, also known as Omatamix)
BY
BYG (pronounced as “big”)
Classic (the old setup)
TBD

The selection of the fifth setup will be done through public voting. One of the candidates for now is bsrti-invert, but certainly more alternatives should be considered. The voting will start during the first two months of the Festival and will continue for the next 2-3 months. Until then, discussions are more than welcome!

There is a lot more to cover that didn't fit in this post, and we will include more details in the next announcements. Meanwhile, feel free to discuss and ask questions; we've included some general ones in the Q&A section below and will keep it updated as more questions come in.

Q&A

Q: Who is eligible to participate?

A: Everyone, however, FFA Rapid qualifiers will have a rating restriction of 2400+.

That's all the exciting news in short. There's more to come, so stay tuned!

4ceaab9b-0e2d-4f43

Super Admins