The introduction of swiss and round robin for tournaments on lichess

#130 The fact that I haven't said much in this particular forum topic doesn't mean that I (or we) don't care. There's one box in this diagram that right now we're trying to avoid while the player count is exponentially increasing:
imgs.xkcd.com/comics/good_code.png

Greetings!

In the post #128 (belonging to @Toadofsky) a video was attached.

The video is in English. I understand written English, but I don't understand spoken English.

Could someone briefly explain what the video is about?

# 131

Finally! I shed some tears of joy when I read your lines. Finally the silence is broken, there’s a developer’s voice that cares! (Yes, @thibault did contribute to this thread, but with sole focus on improving Arena. And yes, @psuter helped us to understand the past.)

I have to admit that I already got the impression that this debate should be silenced by just not entering it. Obviously, this impression was wrong.

As I’ve made clear before, I utterly appreciate all of your hard work that allows us to play our favorite game in this wonderful environment for free. Nevertheless, I question your communication strategy. Why didn’t you send a clear message? Something like:

“We welcome Corona refugees from the OTB world to Lichess. Your decision was right – this is the best place to play chess in the internet: Beautiful, community-driven and free! Lichess offers plenty of possibilities for chess lovers and supports all the tasks of your home chess club [especially training of kids and youngsters; add more advertisement here]. While we are excited to provide you with a unique and fascinating way of organizing tournaments which even the World Champion loves (we call it “Arena”), we are well aware that you might miss your favorite pairing systems such as Swiss or Round Robin when organizing your traditional club tournaments. Right now, our small and enthusiastic team has to focus on keeping track with the daily increasing number of Lichess addicts, but we are looking forward to implement Swiss and Round Robin as the opportunity arises. For now, see our toolbox for organizers of tournaments [explanation of Arena options; workarounds for RR and Swiss].”

Instead, you left us alone with @tpr and his/her arguments.

Beautifully written, just make it happen :-)

#133 Fair question. Speaking for myself and my 42 forum comments on the topic:
lichess.org/forum/search?text=user%3AToadofsky+swiss
... I have job commitments & real-life commitments too, and Multi-Variant SF (among my other projects) has been on fire for the last month or so - lots of red X's:
travis-ci.org/ddugovic/Stockfish

Less personally, Lichess staff were trying to help with:
* Lichess' online player count quadrupled in 1 month... more players means more people testing everything in every possible way, resulting in blind, color-blind, browser-specific, and other issues
* Every possible way includes moderators having to deal with suspicious players who ask questions we haven't heard before, at a time when the servers were on fire
* Upgrade a front end server and rewrote some front end code
* Upgrade a back end server and rewrote some back end code
* We released Team Battles. Perhaps this could have been timed better if we anticipated how politicians would coordinate (or not) with doctors and scientists and what effects their actions and inactions would have on online chess.
* Probably other things, I don't remember.

I join lichess tournaments for the wrong reason. I don't like the Arena format at all. But I still join. The reason is that I often get to play against players who berserk and it gives them half as much time as I have and then improves my chance of winning and increasing my rating. It's not really fair but it's the rule here.

# 135
Again, I honestly adore your work and I am thankful that you entered this thread. Full stop.

My point in # 133 was: One message instead of 42, one thread on the topic instead of many. But this should not concern all the guys in front of red X’s, this is something that moderators deal with.

For me, the debate is over. I engaged in the discussion because I was desperately trying to understand the real reason behind the “Arena only policy”. Both the contributions of @bufferunderrun and @tpr were not particularly helpful in this respect (although the latter were very entertaining).

For the bigger part of the debate, I thought that the real reason is either something religious (“There shall be no other pairing system besides Arena!”) or something related to corporate identity (“Lichess shall remain recognizable as the Arena server!”). Then, #94, #105, and #128 pointed to a different direction. With # 131 there is finally a clear and satisfying explanation – at least for me.

Thus, I will shut up and play some chess. Thanks to everybody – I’ve learned a lot!

PS: Imo, everybody who comes up with this topic in the future should be redirected to this thread.

Lichess could probably learn from the way ICC did (and still does) swiss tournaments. Stone age server, but that is one of the things they did really well.

Swiss tournaments, especially the one used by FIDE, have a lot of edge cases that need to be checked and dealt with, at the detriment of performance.

Arena pairings, which are simpler, already crashed the servers several times.

It means that the implementation would need to really effective, in order to add it to Lichess, and it takes a lot of time and testing to do so.

I'm sure that swiss pairings are not that hard to implement. Maybe even simpler than arena pairings.