Automatch updates 2024-12-10

[shinuito]

@jgk

What if the Options button was a little less obvious? Maybe a gear icon.

Like

I think a number of comments are reinventing or requesting essentially the old layout, which I’m not sure is actually friendlier, given it hides most of the info you want to know about.

But then

@Longer queue time and custom/quick separated

It also feels cluttered to me now too (as an experienced Go player with a lot of experience with navigating different sites and configuration processes, and having spent 2+ years on OGS…) and was a bit much to process on first glance

is quite fair.

If you want a comparison to the (mobile) version of other popular chess sites

I think you can only avoid the cluttered-ness if it turns out that some settings are just not popular and you don’t make a button for them at all.

I think we’ll find out if certain Fischer or byo yomi settings aren’t popular per board size after some time and maybe the 9x9, 13x13, 19x19 sets of options could collapse down to a smaller list.

Imagine for example if almost nobody plays “live” 13x13 and 9x9, and nobody plays blitz 19x19.

Then maybe you can already collapse down to just a few buttons like

Blitz 9x9
Blitz 13x13
Rapid 9x9
Rapid13x13
Rapid 19x19
Live 19x19

and depending again on whether Fischer or byo-yomi is possible you could either duplicate a button or make it specific to that time control. Maybe only Fischer is ever played on 9x9 etc.

Anyway I think data driven decisions there would be better than just feelings.

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I think what you can see from lichess is the way they make the buttons very compact, while for chesscom, the takeaway could be on how to organise multiple popular settings.

Again imagine if there were only 3 popular settings per board size, then you could do a chesscom like grid

9x9
30s + 5x10s ……. 2m+5s …… 2m + 5x30s

13x13
……….

19x19
……….

Again with the layout dictated by only the most popular settings.

@fuseki3

Or perhaps put a checkbox for Fischer Byo

It could be the case that a checkbox is cleaner for toggling handicap on or off, or if one really needs to toggle Fischer to byo-yomi, but my guess is it won’t be one or the other only that popular - and I don’t think one should hide popular UI choices.

I think hiding things is less intuitive even if it’s “more clean”.

For me I like that we can collapse the custom match stuff like

because that is actually complicated, and if you want a simple game, and you don’t have to worry if someone has picked 12m + 4x8s byo-yomi for some strange reason, or a 30 min absolute time game.