9/7/18 Dev Update

Welcome back to another dev update! Chess.com has been hard at work adding all kinds of new features and fixes; We have tons still in the works but read on to see the newest and coolest from the last ~3 months.  

- Let's start by talking about tactics scoring.

Based on your feedback, we know people find it demoralizing to gain so little and lose so much, based upon getting Tactics puzzles right and wrong. Of course, the main culprit here is **TIME**. You earn less for your hard-won successes because you took “too long.”

To allow more reward for thinking carefully about the solutions to each puzzle, we have tweaked the scoring logic: Time is now less important, and the base amount you can gain (or lose!) from a given correct solution has been increased.

- Related, unrated tactics show up in history now.

- Did you enjoy TCEC? Well check out https://www.chess.com/computer-chess-championship or if you prefer, watch it on twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/computerchess

- Give the gift of chess to your friends! It's now easier than ever to gift memberships to those close you! Look for this icon: click and follow a few easy steps!

- Daily chess now allows tables bases. For more information, please read this blog: https://www.chess.com/blog/monitor/rules-update-tablebases-in-correspondence-chess

- While we are talking about daily we should mention tournaments: In situations where the group leader has finished all their games and its mathematically impossible for anyone to catch them, the next round of tournament can start without needing the rest of games from group to finish. 

- Enjoy Four Player Chess?  Well, it's got a crazy ton of new improvements! Read about them here: https://www.chess.com/blog/jdcannon/4-player-chess-improvements

- Everyone likes to know how they stack up against the competition which is why we've now added leaderboards for all our chess variants! 

Check them out here:  https://www.chess.com/leaderboard/live/crazyhouse

- Related, leaderboards only show those who have played 20 games in the last 90 days for that game type. 

- Bughouse has zero lag forgiveness now. Players will be charged the time it takes for moves to communicate with the server, but critically for bughouse, this ensures that clocks will always correspond correctly. 

- If you have sent a message to anyone on the site, you already know this, but messages got a major overhaul with a sleek new and more functional design. 

- In live chess, your disconnect rate is based on the last 20 games instead of last 3 days which makes it easier to recover if you had a cruddy internet connection for a bit. 

- We're using Stockfish.js 9 now instead of 8 across the site for analysis. 

- Currently only available for iOS users, but we now have a Hero feature which allows you get updated when your hero starts playing in live chess so you can watch! 

To enable, visit https://www.chess.com/settings/notifications and make sure "A Hero starts playing" is enabled. 

Then just follow the hero of your choice to get notified when they start playing.  You can also add those you wish to follow here: https://www.chess.com/settings/following

Current list of heroes include:  
@Hikaru, @erichansen, @DanielRensch, @gmjlh, @MagnusCarlsen, @KNVB, @RLH2, @JohnUrschel,
@LyonBeast, @AlexandraBotez, @Anna_Rudolf, @GMWSO, @FabianoCaruana