New Tournament Formats and More

Hello everyone, it took a while, but I'm back with another update. So let's see what's new.

Tournaments

Two new long-term tournament formats have been added - Round-Robin and Organized. Unlike Arena tournaments (previously the only format available on Lishogi) these tournaments can last for weeks, with players scheduling games between themselves and playing them whenever they choose.

Round-robin Tournament Format

Rules of Round-Robin tournament are simple. Players challenge one another. You can play each player at most once. You receive 3 points for winning, 2 points for drawing and 1 point for losing. The player with most points wins.

More information with a link to a detailed guide can be found on the updated FAQ page.

Organized tournament format

In organized tournaments the tournament creator is the only one, who can create games that can be played, the tournament creator decides who plays who, how many points are awarded and can also suggest when the game should start.
Similarly to round-robin tournaments though, the players themselves need to start the game.

You can find more information on the FAQ page.

Correspondence games

Since both Round-Robin and Organized tournaments can last for long periods, support for correspondence games was added. Notable difference to real-time tournaments is that you can play more than one correspondence game at a time in a tournament.

Player management

More options were given to tournament organizers. Tournament organizers can find these new features after clicking Manage players button or in tournament creation/edit form.

Ask to join

Tournament organizer can now choose players that will be allowed to join their tournament. To have this option you need to check "Ask to join" when creating the tournament.

Kicking players

The tournament organizer can now remove a player from the tournament if necessary. Before the tournament starts the player is removed completely, once the tournament starts the player is only suspended from playing games and their score is set to zero.

Limit joining

Tournament organizers now have an option to close joining during the tournament - which will prevent users from joining the tournament.
Before tournament creation max numbers of players that can join can also be set.

Professional mode

When creating a new tournament you now have an option of selecting "Professional mode". This enables the following:

• Pieces can be moved to any square on the board
• King in check is not highlighted
• Premoves are disabled
• Pieceset designs that indicate how pieces move are not allowed

If you make an illegal move, by moving a piece to a square it cannot move to, or ignoring king in check, you will immediately lose the game. It's easy to misclick so be careful.

Currently this is available in tournaments and simuls. It's also possible to create a game with Professional mode using API. In the future I might add it to Friend challenges.

Other tournament changes

• Reduced the number of lishogi scheduled tournaments - since a long lasting tournaments are now possible, it seems redundant to have so many Arena tournaments. I kept only Yearly tournaments, Monthly tournaments and Shield tournaments. I also decided to deprecate future HyperRapid and SuperBlitz tournaments.
  But if these tournaments were already scheduled I will leave them be, but no new ones will be created.
  If there was a scheduled tournament you want back, let me know on GitHub.
• Tournament home list reworked
• Tournament creator form updated
• Added upcoming tournaments list
• Added tournament notification 24 hours prior, so that you get a reminder you signed up for a tournament.

Since this required a lot of changes you might (and will) find some bugs. Please report them on GitHub, so I can fix them as soon as possible. Please be patient with these new features until all bugs are fixed. Thank you!

Future tournament formats

Two new tournament formats could be added in the future - King of the hill and Elimination tournament, if this is something you want to see happen, let me know.

Frontend rewrite

A large portion of the frontend code was updated, overhauled , rewritten and completely reorganized. Almost every file was changed in some way.
You won't hopefully notice most of these changes, but if you do notice any incorrect behavior please let me know on GitHub.

One of these changes was switching to CSS variables for styling, which made it easy to make custom background themes, so that's something I decided to add:

Other changes

• Draws do NOT affect ratings from now on
• More robust checking of proper socket versioning in games - should help resolve the occasional synchronization issue
• Switched to chart.js for nicer graphs
• Added chatroom
• Improved embeds in forums and messages
• Added new notation - Yorozuya
• Added new pieceset - 8 Bit alternative
• Added new pieceset - Firi
• Added new pieceset - Pencil
• Fixed allowing specific illegal chushogi moves
• Use of circles over check marks, since check marks are ambiguous
• Fixed keyboard move input not working for some moves
• Mainline can be shared via URL in analysis board
• Correspondence games now not available to non registered users
• Shogi captchas around the site now use minishogi to make them less annoying
• More strings translated and made translatable
• And many other changes and fixes, some small, some big, but too many to list them all here. If you want to see all the commits that went into this update - click here.

What's next?

Since the addition of puzzle check to shoginet over 5000 puzzle candidates were found or submitted by you. I've been putting this off for some time now, but I hope I can go through these soon and finally add them to Lishogi puzzle database.

Another big thing would be the mobile app, while I try to make Lishogi as mobile-friendly as possible, a dedicated app could bring Lishogi to more people and provide a better mobile-first priority experience on smartphones. Some work on the app was already done, I have 90% working lobby, setup, games and analysis. But still a lot of work remains - tournaments, simuls, studies, editor, etc.

Final words

So that's it for now. I tried to test everything multiple times with every edge case I could think of, but I know I still missed a lot of bugs, probably even some obvious ones, so if you find something please report it on GitHub. If you notice something that you think could be better or different - also please submit an issue on GitHub, it's the most certain way, that I will see it.

I want to thank everyone who donated or contributed to Lishogi, Lishogi wouldn't be here without you - THANK YOU. You make this site possible.
If you haven’t donated yet and would like to support Lishogi, please consider making a donation. Every donation helps me in keeping the site running and adding more features.

Thank you everyone for your support! Have fun!

Wanderer