In article . com,
" wrote:

But Dave, was it not the ICCC membership that cried for 'more services'
and a willingness to pay for them? Wasn't it the ICC membership that
screamed for GM simuls and more relays and other various chess
shin-digs that are not free and a willingness to pay for them?
Didn't ICC just do what it's membership asked it to do?


No, actually, it wasn't the membership. You can see all the details by
looking at the old archives of the chess newsgroups, but FICS and ICC
broke apart because a lot of people didn't see what their extra money
was going to get them.

Do the math:

Ask a friend to play each night, every night, for a year. After 2 weeks
you've ponied up EACH $50 in beer and chips money...

But this doesn't make any sense.

If I'm eating chips and drinking beer when I'm playing chess, I'm doing
that regardless of whether my friend is sitting across the table from
me, across town, or across the globe.

(Although, to be perfectly honest, there are enough added bonuses to
playing face-to-face with a friend that, even if it's a financial loss,
I'd almost always choose that over playing online anyway).

Try to get a GM to come to your house and play. Good luck.

I don't have much in the way of interest of playing GMs, or of watching
them play. Occasionally I'll watch games from a major match or
tournament, but I can do that on FICS. My desire to do that is more than
met by the number of GM games relayed on FICS.

Try and get 16 players together at your house for a blitz tourney every
night. You probably don't have 15 friends...

And, similarly, this is a false comparison. There are plenty of blitz
tournaments on FICS - far more, in fact, than I could ever be interested
in playing in.

So, I ask again, what does the $50 bucks a year get me that I'm not
getting on FICS?

Lastly, and this is the real question, why make this personal?

Some people, obviously, see value in the extra GM access, in the larger
number of lectures, and the larger player pool (the latter almost made
me consider switching, but it seems to me that the number of standard
time control players on FICS has risen in the last couple of years.)

Others of us don't.

Why is this a character issue?

Why does talking up ICC have to be about attacking FICS?

-Ron