Yes, I agree with step-by-step approach. Again, ideally, I want to see a data on how beginners drop from the website due to the issue with AF, but seems like many people agree that redesign is needed. Clossius already did a great job on the redesign: New Landing Page Idea
But I too think we need to cut options even more. Having more options is what scares people, beginners especially. One blitz, one bullet, one live. Correspondence are going to custom games. But we need to decide what to focus on, the problem we are having is that there is too much. We should decide on time, on handicap, on something else I forgot about.
For the next stage, I would try to implement automatic pairing between AF and custom games if the rules are similar enough. What we need to do is to decide what rules are similar to not break the rating. Is 20m+5x30s the same as 40+5x30s? 40+3x20s? But I don’t have anything against putting more strict rules, I think it would only benefit as people would have more understandable rules to play by – and expectations from the server, which is the most important part. Especially considering most of the customer games are correspondence games.
Because the community won’t drop the settings, we could try to implement a fallback scenario for cases when there is no game with your specific settings, but with the closer settings. E.g., you ask for fischer time, but only byo-yomi is available. You could have a pop-up or something with the suggestion that you could either continue waiting or agree to the another settings. It’s a little bit weird because otherwise what the point of settings is, but what can we do, right.
We could just analyse the data to see what the most popular formats are. I would do it, but I need a database dump. I tried to do it already, but I was, sorry, but, suffering from getting the dataset from API.