Feedback on new analysis board

For me, the new analysis board is quite an disappointment. The main issuses are ...

1.) The precalculated lines ("xxx is good") are simply wrong, most likely because the engine is not given enough time for precalculation. I've already seens tons of examples where the on-the-fly-calculated lines (with increased time limit) straightforward contradicted the precalculated lines, even cases where moves that according to the on-the-fly calculation were optimal, were considered to be an inaccuracy according to the (precalculated) analysis.

2.) To make things worse, you cannot longer choose the increase the time invested (like with the "deep analysis" button in the previous version). Now, it's just _always_ wrong, or at least untrustworthy .

3.) And to make things even worse: As opposed to the untrustworthy precalculated lines, you cannot pick an (full) on-the-fly-calculated line, but have to pick those move-by-move (which means that with every move the complete line has to be calculated anew, which is really annoying)

4.) The whole things has grown much too fat, with the consequence that even on my quite decent desktop computer, the move animations are everything but smooth. The pieces stumble across the board with varying speed, and sound and animations are completely out of sync. And turning the animations off will affect other areas (like live chess) as well (where the animations are smooth even on my somewhat outdated notebook)

5.) The option to disable the best move display does not make the nasty arrows disappear from the board (On TheServerYouShallNotName you can really switch them off at least). Together with the new icons and symbols for the move classification ("book", "good" etc.), the whole board display is quite confusing.

6.) When it comes to "performance summary", like presumably many if not most users, I'd like to know exactly two things: The percentage of strongs moves (book+best+excellent), and the percentage of weak moves (inacc.+mistake+blunder). Instead, I'm given some mysterious "Accuracy" value, but this one for every piece type (which I considered to be an interesting idea at first, but has turned out to be pointless: At least in my games there seems to be absolutely no correlation between piece type and move accuracy)

7.) There are numerous more issuses (like why on earth is the graphical evaluation display always cropped at +/-5, when for the vast majority of the users it is NOT irrelevant if the evaluation is +5.1 or +12.4, or since when do we implement charts with vertical and horizontal scrollbars that hide each other, not to mention that they are dispensable in the first place, and where are the labels and values for the time chart, ...), but this post has already grown way too long.

Being in the software business myself, I know how hard it is to design and implement online applications (with real-time components, multiple platforms, heavy load, localization, ...), and to keep them halfway bug-free, and all-over-all chess.com is imho doing quite a good job (excellent even: the new lessons format). But the new analysis board seriously still needs some revision.

I bet the developers would love to have you join the Beta group.  Here's the announcement, might be a few answers in there...

https://www.chess.com/blog/News/meet-the-new-analysis-game-report-retry-mistakes-more

There are multiple forum threads on the new analysis board. I append to this feedback thread, because feedback is all I want to contribute.

I used to analyze games with Chessbase for decades. That's quite a powerful and efficient tool. It's a pity that it has always been crippled by various copyprotection mechanisms, so I don't get it to work anymore even though I payed for it. Anyway, the web analysis boards, even the one on the Chessbase website, are clearly inferior by now, so I won't go too much into details. I only want to raise 2 issues that I find obvious and annoying. One is that it is very slow, and for every move you make it takes a few seconds to update the view. Navigation was significantly faster in the previous version.

The other issue is not new to this version, but I am surprised that it has not been fixed. That should be relatively easy. This is one of the things where Chessbase shows how to do it right. It's about the structure of variations in the game notation.

This is very confusing. The move 2.Nxg4 (in the position after 1.- Rxe3) shows up 3 times, and the "Add comment" link for that move shows up twice. It would be correct to display every move in a given position only once. There are 2 standard ways of grouping variations. One is to display the mainline move, then to open brackets or start indentation, then to list the alternative moves (with subsequent lines), then to close brackets/indentation, then to proceed with the next mainline move. The other way is to create numbered lists (chapters) for all moves in a given position. In the above example, it would be:

1.- Rxe3 (1.- Rc5 2.Ng4 Qg7 3.Rxe7 Qxe7 4.e4 h5 5.Nxe5 +-; 1.- Rxe4 2.Nxe4 Qf5 3.Nxc3 Qf8 4.Qxf8+ Kxf8 5.Nb5 +-; 1.- Rd3 2.Qxe7 Qxe7 3.Rxe7 Rxd1+ 4.Nxd1 Bxd5 5.Rxd7 +-) 2.Ng4 (2.Rxe3 etc.)

or:

A) 1.- Rc5 2.Ng4 Qg7 3.Rxe7 Qxe7 4.e4 h5 5.Nxe5 +-

B) 1.- Rxe4 2.Nxe4 Qf5 3.Nxc3 Qf8 4.Qxf8+ Kxf8 5.Nb5 +-

C) 1.- Rd3 2.Qxe7 Qxe7 3.Rxe7 Rxd1+ 4.Nxd1 Bxd5 5.Rxd7 +-

D) 1.- Rxe3

    a) 2.Rxe3 Rxe3 3.Ng4 Qc3 4.Qxc3 Rxc3 Kf7 +-

    b) 2.Rxe7 Qxe7 3.Ng4 Qxb4 4.axb4 Re2 5.Ne5 Kf8 ±

    c) 2.Qxc4 R7xe4 3.Nxe4 Qb2 4.Nf2 Qxa3 5.Qc7 Rxg3+ =

    d) 2.Ng4 etc.

You can also combine these 2 methods or use arabic or roman numbers for the lists.

It gets even more comprehensible with different colors for different sideline depths.Text within brackets may also be distinguished by font weight and/or size:

1.- Rxe3 (1.- Rc5 2.Ng4 Qg7 3.Rxe7 Qxe7 4.e4 h5 5.Nxe5 +-; 1.- Rxe4 2.Nxe4 Qf5 3.Nxc3 Qf8 4.Qxf8+ Kxf8 5.Nb5 +-; 1.- Rd3 2.Qxe7 Qxe7 3.Rxe7 Rxd1+ 4.Nxd1 Bxd5 5.Rxd7 +-) 2.Ng4 (2.Rxe3 etc.)

1.- Rxe3 (1.- Rc5 2.Ng4 Qg7 3.Rxe7 Qxe7 4.e4 h5 5.Nxe5 +-; 1.- Rxe4 2.Nxe4 Qf5 3.Nxc3 Qf8 4.Qxf8+ Kxf8 5.Nb5 +-; 1.- Rd3 2.Qxe7 Qxe7 3.Rxe7 Rxd1+ 4.Nxd1 Bxd5 5.Rxd7 +-) 2.Ng4 (2.Rxe3 etc.)