On Aug 22, 12:14 pm, Sanny wrote:

Bobby Fisher is same as Taylor Kingston.

!?!?!


He is Second best player at
GetClub after you. IM Innes have not played much games at GetClub So I
can't say much about him.

Nomorechess Still holds the Crown. Chrisf and Zebediah may Challege
your Crown As they are the most Aggresive Players I have seen. They
are driving against the wind.

When Taylor kingston and you used to play Chess at GetClub.com It was
easy to increase rating You used to get +10 for winning a weak
beginner Player.

In fact, it seems that those lucky ones who showed
up first had the best of things. As every level began
with a rating of 1000 and was thereafter driven down,
the ones who played rated games *first* gained by far
the most "easy" rating points, not only from the
program, but from anyone they played who had
played it as well.

When I began playing a lot of games, most levels
not only were already driven into the dirt by Taylor
Kingston (among others) having clobbered them
repeatedly, but in addition, your "improvements" had
a significant impact on the strength of the program.

In fact, when the program seemed to me to have
made some real improvement (not just claimed),
this is when most of the old timers stopped playing
rated games, or else switched IDs. Later on, the
"improvements" went in the wrong direction, or else
went in random directions, like a bubble floating in
the wind.

Really, you can't continually make drastic changes
to a chess program and have meaningful ratings. In
addition, you should never have started all the levels
at the same rating -- that is ludicrous. If you must
make drastic changes to the program, its rating
should be reset or else it should be considered as
a new, unrated player until its strength is known.

Think hard: when I beat your program, does it get
any weaker? No, so then, why does its rating drop?
This makes no sense. The computers ought to have
fixed ratings, and not be toyed with. If you want to
tweak level X, then enter level X as a new, unrated
player whose rating will be determined by its results,
and then *fixed* there. Simple.

------

But enough about ratings. Your real problem is
that you are attempting to charge money to play
games, which is a strategy that won't work. Look
at the other sites on the Web: they allow non-
members to play for free, but hit them with a ton
of advertisements while offering to remove them
if you pay to join. They also limit the number of
games unless you pay, and they restrict options
such as starting rated games or analyzing on
another board -- whatever. But none of the ones
I have tried force anyone to pay to play; instead,
what they do is force you to look at annoying ads
until you do. That "business model", as they call
it these days, is working. Yours isn't.


Right now I am playing Rob Mitchell some games
at chessworld.net, which seems to me to be a bit
inferior to redhotpawn.com in terms of how moves
are entered. But they have team play, and who
knows what else (I don't pay to play). In fact, they
offer free months to those who sign up friends, and
this seems to be working, just as you would expect.
Such ideas are easy to find, if you simply were to
explore the Web sites of your competition. See
what you like, and copy the concept on your own
site. Then discard your chess program and in its
place install Crafty 0.01 or something. ;D


-- help bot