I like chess.com, it’s polished, but it’s also greedy-guts and annoying as hell with regard to things like notifications not being timely or if they’re turned on they don’t respect what I want to be notified about with more granular controls (I think). Also, they screwed
@Noodle and it’s not okay to screw my online acquaintances! Only we get to do that!
Anyway, I’d be bummed if
@s@nDOk@n or anyone stayed away due to platform. We want folks to show up, have fun, and play in a timely fashion (sorry
@koala we gotta be timely, sorta!).
I like Chess.com, too, mostly. Although I will say it's funny where they choose to polish things up. They often opt for fancy bells and whistles rather than useful chess features. For instance, the iOS app doesn't support predictive moves after
decades of requests, but they have time to revamp puzzles with a fancy graphical advancement ladder. And since it's not possible to go down a rung, ever, the ladder really measures only how much time one spends doing puzzles. (Classic puzzle behavior—i.e. having a rating that fluctuates according to solves and misses—is still available and I recommend using that instead.) As far as I can tell, they've made it so you can't even get into analysis mode without running Game Review first. And while it's kind of fun to be told "this is a blunder" and have a second try at it, the analysis is so shallow that it's often misleadingly inaccurate.
I haven't been using Lichess either, because I don't think they support any kind of grace period on daily chess timeouts, without which it's a waste of time for me to start games. I know that it has superior analysis tools, and they don't paywall doing more than N puzzles per day or whatnot. I recall it being about the same experience when playing games, except that the confirm/cancel buttons are on opposite sides from Chess.com's and I kept tripping on that. I am neither for or against using it for the tourney, except inasmuch as it might affect participation.
Anyway, it's gratifying that people care about my experience, but I do not think it should affect where the tournament is held. I was 1) venting; 2) making excuses for myself
; and 3) thought at most it would be a small influence on someone considering subscribing. The primary consideration should be ease of organization for our wonderful tourney directors, secondarily appealing to the greatest number of players, and thirdly any effect on tournament play (e.g. timely move notifications, mobile access to predictive moves).
