The site, though, is beautiful and a joy to play on. My last online chess was at Yahoo Chess, and this feels like walking on air compared to Y! Chess's clunky interface. Beautiful site, very pleasing to use.
A nice feature to keep semi-serious players around would be some way to get scored or sorted, so you somewhat consistently can get decent matches. Overall I really like it though, cheers.
Edit: Got a full game in - http://lichess.org/bsba_b - I was black. Made some mistakes, I'm rusty. But the interface is really a joy, I like it a lot.
Could this be the reason that registration would be a better idea, and thus explain the success of all the chess servers that require it? I'd much prefer to play against an evenly matched opponent, or with a stronger player who I can learn from by analysing the game with afterwards - and definitely against someone who will finish the game. Both of these things requires reputation, and reputation requires registration. I found fics to be great for this.
I apologise to whoever I annoyed by not even playing the first move. I wanted to see if there were _any_ options to discriminate my opponent (for example by supplying my own rating on an honour system); there were none.
It is nice, I agree that there should be some sort of difficulty level to select. I got paired with someone much better than I and lost pretty quickly. I am not a total newbie, but I'm far from being good :)
http://awesomescreenshot.com/0fa3r9l09
The site, though, is beautiful and a joy to play on. My last online chess was at Yahoo Chess, and this feels like walking on air compared to Y! Chess's clunky interface. Beautiful site, very pleasing to use.
A nice feature to keep semi-serious players around would be some way to get scored or sorted, so you somewhat consistently can get decent matches. Overall I really like it though, cheers.
Edit: Got a full game in - http://lichess.org/bsba_b - I was black. Made some mistakes, I'm rusty. But the interface is really a joy, I like it a lot.