Dear
lichess.org team,
I really don´´ t get why there are so few crazyhouse arenas now. Wehn I started to play crazyhouse like 2 years ago there was an arena every hour. It was great, even if sometimes there were just under ten people. It was still way more fun for me than waiting for a player (takes ages when you wanna play crazyhouse sometimes). Then last year there were fewer arenas, every two hours, apparently because more and more people wanted to play 960 and those arenas got more, at the cost of crazyhouse. And now it´s even just every third hour - and the worst thing is that I just saw the last arena was 1+0 and the arena 2 hours after that will ALSO be 1+0, which many crazyhouse players don´t even play. That´´ s really really frustrating.
My question simply is: Why can´t there be more crazyhouse arena? What is the exact reason for this decrease? And why can´t those arenas coexist with there being more arenas in other variants?
All the best,
Daniel Maier
#1 I have a similar recollection: time was, one could play Crazyhouse (zh) all day every day but the only official 960 arena was 5+0 and around 22:00 UTC (I think King of the Hill (KotH) was a bit later). Moreover, while Blitz and Bullet had (and still have) separate ratings playing 1+0, 2+0, 3+0, 3+1, 4+2 or 5+0 would (and still does) affect the same rating. Then Lichess restarted and no-increment zh arenas alternated with 960 arenas on an hourly basis.
*It is worth noting at this point that zh was and remains more popular than other variants, judging by the number of players*
Now it seems we have a number of KotH arenas and even fewer zh arenas.
Not being myself a Lichess mod or developer or anything I can only guess at the reasons for this, and with the caveat that I do not presume to speak for Lichess my guess is as follows:
Just about any variant arena will attract fewer participants than a standard arena of any time control, even with a rating restriction like <1300 or >2200. People around the world deserve a chance to play any variant they wish, Lichess servers can only handle so many tournaments and with all these team events it is not like you actually need to wait for an official tournament in order to play. What's more, by the law of diminishing returns you will find that you play better if you restrict yourself to just a few games daily rather than going on a tiltathon.
Of course I would very much like to know if I have got any part of that wrong!
I’ve been wondering the same thing.
Also, on the topic of opponents, you can challenge me if you see me online. We played some games a while ago and were a pretty close match for each other. Finding individual opponents isn’t a replacement for arenas though, and I’d love to have arenas every hour again.
We can create custom ZH arenas for those hours in between "official" arenas.
Sure they won't attract as many players at the beginning, but I think the ZH community is big enough for them to get traction. And there's the plus that we can create them with time controls other than the official, or several at the same time.
When there were arenas every hour, some players were complaining of specific features of them: that some time controls were missing, that under certain rating limit would encourage weaker players, that rated arenas could be combined with casual ones, etc. And now that we have slots free from official arenas and the flexibility to create our arenas with any parameters, I'm amazed that the ZH community is not moving more towards this.
I agree with
@pepellou. Perhaps use the community updated crazyhouse calendar to keep people informed too?
@thefinnisher what do you reckon about #4 and
@okei what do you reckon about #5?
In principle it's possible, but it's an enourmous hassle. Very different from going into lichess and seeing the zh arenas in the live tournaments.
Would you please expand on that okei? Why is it such a hassle? Is it bordering on hustle, personal time-wise?
I guess what okei is saying is it's a hassle in terms of organization, which cannot be a 1-man task. Creating 1 arena is easy, but creating many, announcing them, voting/picking the parameters, etc. is a community thing. Apart of publishing the calendar or announcing it on discord and other typical zh channels.
I understand that, but I also understand that a community effort is always easier when the community "wants", i.e. many people interested.
I of course offer my help should any efforts in this direction happen.
I too would like to see more ZH Arenas again. Lobby matches in old FICS lingo build HATE, because you play a single opponent repeatedly. Arena matches have many improvements: rotating opponents means it's less of a deal if you lose to someone (you just play the next match..._), the somewhat random element of matching means the tourney results involve luck, so again not such a big deal where you place, and finally the tournaments have a set end time, forcing you to take a break and giving an chance to decide if you really should join yet another tourney.
If FICs had come up with Arenas early on ZH and Bug played there might not have devolved into such a hate troll cesspool.
