Bughouse on Lichess

Sorry @blunderman1 and @spidersneedlovetoo that you had to deal with such toxic players. Your stories come from two rather different backgrounds but share a common thread. blunderman's story is quite tragic, in fact, because I just find it utterly incomprehensible how little overlap there is between the crazyhouse and bughouse communities. I mean, that is not surprising because it mostly boils down to toxicity, but it's rather aggravating that such a fractured and small community gets even smaller.

I agree with you, blunderman, that my approach perhaps reeks of too much reductionism. I think the reason so many players are so toxic can best be described using your own terms: "you instinctively blame partner for ruining what you have 'worked so hard to achieve'". The misconception here, of course, is that these toxic players don't understand that there are these countless small decisions that can affect the game and that some of them really boil down to factors that your partner cannot control. On a related note, I think the most convincing argument to "rehabilitate" these toxic players is that being toxic makes you lose more because your partners will be rightfully angered by your behavior and will not play as well as they could had you not been attacking them with a barrage of insults. Therefore, it is in the best interests of the toxic player to not be toxic if they want to win!

"bughouse is a game that, with the proper formatting, can even reduce toxicity and emotional violence in our society" That is a very nice thought, spiders, and speaks to my inner idealism! I hope that that can be proven eventually.

Yeah

Has pychess considered bughouse? I assumed it's a popular question/request for gbtami as well.

@shamalamadingdong said in #23:
> Has pychess considered bughouse? I assumed it's a popular question/request for gbtami as well.

They have, but the guy who is implementing it is very lazy

I'm really sry to being not helpful enough implementing it, but to be honest I'm similarly lazy to finish implementing puzzles :)

What pychess should do is to add a Capablanca chess Bughouse.

#1
@spidersneedlovetoo

#6
@blunderman1

Bughouse has been this way since the early days of the ICC\FICS and this has been his marker. The reason is due to his countercultural background, and the well-known fact of the danger of addiction, which has even been acknowledged by chess trainers. I once cited such a quote in my longread in chapter - crazymaharajah.dreamwidth.org/9751.html

#13

I know about your development and have spent the last two years talking to people about how cool it would be to implement it. I think it would be a takeoff for pychess as well as an opportunity to get donations for the site. Maybe you should tell us what kind of help you need and we could find volunteers willing to bring the bug closer to implementation?

#14

What's on their site is extremely flawed, but including a pool of incredibly low ranked players who can be both weak players and trolls wanting to make someone uncomfortable. The site itself is too archaic to maintain good communication, buggers only started playing there because FICS died under the onslaught of toxicity, paranoia and mutual grievances. Less than 100 bug games a month have been played on FICS in recent years.

#21

@FischyVishy
Well, when zh came on here it was pretty toxic for a while too hehe. That started to change towards the end of the 2010s and is pretty rare now. But to give you an example, zh on chesscom is still often toxic, lots of trolls, haters and sandbagging.

The only reason bughouse on fics died is because people prefer to play on a webpage.

@Katoh1 said in #28:
> The only reason bughouse on fics died is because people prefer to play on a webpage.

I've heard different versions. There is a version that people held on to their ratings so much that they stopped trusting each other. The client "thief" is still very good, so it's hard to give a reason. You can't play on web page in bug or zh and the page itself looks too raw, as if no one has worked on it properly.

@CrazyMaharajah

Yes addiction is real with bughouse and chesscom's pool makes it too easy to get your next "fix". It has to be mentioned they do have rating filter that I am using which helps somewhat with getting paired with really low rated players, but it definitely increases the addiction factor.

I joined lichess 2016 and have almost only played zh here and tbh haven't noticed much toxicity back then, quite the opposite, but don't know. I feel partially the reason is there was some good examples set by popular players and streamers setting the tone of fairplay, mutual respect.

Funny you should mention the obsession with ratings as a toxic factor. We were recently discussing an idea of not keeping individual bughouse ratings at all (except maybe in case of simuling), but record "team ratings" only with the hope to facilitate more constructive and stable long term partnerships. In any case first release probably wont have any ratings and that might actually not be bad long term idea as well.

The story of Thief and how the guy who developed it eventually regretted implementing it, because eventually he ended up seeing the whole game as something "evil" that ruins lives or something like that, really left huge impression on me when I heard it on some bughouse twitch stream a year or so ago. It is partially what got me thinking about the topic of toxicity and what can be done to reduce it. Also if there is any way to reduce the addictiveness and to be allowed to make design decisions that put ethical values over "clicks", best chances you have are with the free software model. That decision to remove followers list/count from lichess is a good example of such design decision I think.

OldHas-Been gave some valuable feedback on that topic as well, when I asked him in chat during one of his ZH streams some time ago, he mentioned the bad and uncomfortable UI as one reason (although was not sure if he referred to chesscom or FICS or both), but also the inability to actually resolve disagreement about whose fault the loss is, because the game is too complex. This second part I have tried to address with spending extra time on having a decent analysis page and recording as much details as possible to be able to replay all events afterwards.

About help, it was very difficult in the early stage to think about organizing team work and splitting tasks, but I am getting very close to have something fully functional (albeit with lots of bugs and also room for improvement), that can serve as a foundation, so hopefully the time for beta testing, feedback by wider audience and ideas for concrete improvements and help with implementing them is coming soon