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Comment by kriops | Hacker News Reader

I think lichess.org is far superior in that it has a super-polished UX in ways that are not immediately obvious. After I made the switch from chess.com in 2014 (I had the paid features), it was always extremely annoying to come back. Also lichess.org gives you most of what chess.com tries to upsell you on, for free. As it happens I've re-validated this over the last few days with dozens of games on chess.com.

A single example, and a counter-point to the article: Drawing knight-moves as "L"-shaped arrows is actually super annoying, because the likelihood that moves between different pairs of squares partially overlap is quite high.

And in general, the lichess.org app is miles ahead on visual clarity, giving feedback on your actions, and indicating your turn (seems trivial I know, but it's not). Chess.com on the other hand offers chess content, such as courses tournament coverage, blogs, etc. that lichess does not.

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The tournament UI has been broken on iOS for years. It doesn't register taps properly and some UI elements are not shown where they should be. OTOH, the website works pretty well on mobile, scrolling aside.

In general, I also had the feeling that the lichess UI is a bit more immediate, it was easier for me to get around.

But I think a big difference is not in features or UX, but the behaviour of the players. Because of its free nature, lichess has several problems that I haven't seen on chess.com. I do use chess.com significantly less, but I've always had civil interactions there.

On lichess:

* people are free to act like jerks, since they will likely get away with it. My chat's turned off, but I can't do anything about people abandoning games when they lose, trying to pretend that they've left so that I don't pay attention and lose on time, etc.

* severe lack of gentlemanly behaviour. As an example, I don't think I've ever seen someone concede a game, it's almost always a bitter fight way past the point a reasonable player may accept defeat.

* Now that I think about it, lichess brings the worst in me. I want to crush my opponents and taunt them. Yet another reason why my chat's turned off.

Blitz is a vicious game, full of trickery. :)

I mean such behaviour is not uncommon on chess.com either. I've reported multiple people for game abandonment / abusive language / acting like jerks / taking super long to make moves in a game that's obviously been lost / etc.

My inbox is on chess is full of such generic boilerplate messages from chess.com; I doubt they really kick anyone off their platform though (unless the player does something extreme):

We've taken action on one of the Stalling / Quitting Games reports that you submitted. (To respect the privacy of our members, we don't specify usernames. Our response may have included warning the member, restricting their activity, or even closing the account.)

You can review our Community Policies here https://www.chess.com/legal/community.

Thank you for helping Chess.com stay fun and friendly!

Thank you very much, Chess.com Support support@chess.com

> taking super long to make moves in a game that's obviously been lost

I'm a novice still (~1500), but at this level you can easily come back from a lost game. Opponents sometimes think that I'm stalling, but in reality I'm trying to make the best out of a lost position. My opinion is that if you go into a game with a certain time limit, the players have full right to use that time how they please. If you are in a hurry, play a different time limit.

I don't play that much chess, but:

If a player has 60 minutes for all their moves, then spend less then a minute for each move, until they are so far behind that in your mind, the game is over, now, they are spending 20 minutes on one move. And I have to still sit in front of the computer, because if I leave, they might make a move just before their timer runs out, hoping that I have already left the room, and now I will lose because it's my timer that runs out.

Play a different time format then. I don’t understand players, several in this thread alone, who complain when their opponent uses some/all of the time that was allotted under the rules of the game that are agreed upon at the start. (I am similarly against the awarding of extra time.)

There's a wide gray area but surely there's some point where you think a person is just being rude.

Eg if someone mouse slips and blinders their queen on their 5th move in a 90 minute game. You have no concern with having to sit there for 1.5 hours where your opponent makes no further moves?

Isn't the idea to set the maximum time permitted per-move to match whatever your personal patience level is?

When I used to play, I also found that people otherwise at a similar level to me were really bad at endgames. Perhaps they resigned too often, and therefore got little endgame experience? Anyway, that meant that it was worth pushing to the end if I wanted to win, because sometimes it worked.

Presumably they can see how many times a player has been reported to abandon a game ahead of time. If it is the first report, I can understand they do nothing. If it is report number 10 ...

> severe lack of gentlemanly behaviour. As an example, I don't think I've ever seen someone concede a game, it's almost always a bitter fight way past the point a reasonable player may accept defeat.

I almost never concede at my (low) level: at my level it's very possible that someone lets me go into a stalemate which is preferable to a loss.

I’m also a low level player but I fundamentally don’t understand the chess culture of “gentlemanly” concession. It’s a game you’re playing to win and even at the highest levels players can and do make mistakes. It’s not over until it’s over. When you compete you play through the whistle. You run past the finish line. You keep throwing towards the endzone even when it’s 28-3 and things are looking pretty bleak.

Yeah I was surprised at that. I think the arrows on chess.com are one of its biggest shortcomings. They are completely opaque and cover a lot of the board.

It's subjective. The arrows and circles on lichess really bug me. I much prefer chess arrows.

The UI is not only more polished, it is a web application packaged natively. Take that all you naysayers who insist you have to go native to write decent mobile apps.

It is not only a web application, it uses fucking mithril which hasn't seen an update in like 5 years. Take that you clueless hipsters who insist you have to use the latest reinvented framework with a yard length of dependencies to build modern UI.

Chess.com does benefit from their collection of training bots with different strategies and more forgiving play style which are pretty neat to play against. Though most of them are behind a paywall so eh.

Lichess only offers stockfish levels when it comes to bots, and even the lowest level seems more brutal than bots with x2 its ELO on chess.com.

Stockfish level 1 can be beaten by a novice playing their 4th or 5th game ever. Also on Lichess there are other bots you can play against, for example the maia series which is an LC0 bot with a neural network trained on Lichess games of a particular rating level. Maia feels much more like a real person than any bot based on stockfish.

https://lichess.org/blog/X9PUixUAANCqFRSh/introducing-maia-a...

Hmm I see, so there are other bots on lichess but they're set up as real players with a bot tag and you play them by challenging them directly. That seems like terrible UX when there's a whole separate menu to set up pve games and no way for a newcomer to learn that...

Sure stockfish level 1 is very beatable, but I do sometimes like sealclubbing super low rated bots so I don't have to think at all when playing and still win, for which the chess.com bots are very neat :P

Yes I agree it would be better and more discoverable if you had a list you could select from when you click the "Play With Computer" button. Maybe part of the reason that they don't is I don't think Lichess themselves actually host any of those bots, there are other people doing that who register it as a bot and it uses the Lichess API.

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