ChessCube is Dead


For the majority of my time playing chess online, I have been using several platforms. The earliest one I used was ChessCube. It looked interesting until a certain point, they changed the rules about their site currency. Before that change, you didn't need to use the 'cubits' to simply play a game. Only when you wanted to get more cubits will you 'bet' some and if you win the game, you gain from your win, or looked in another way, from your opponent's loss.

However, the change came at around 2013 or 2014 perhaps. I'm not too sure when it happened but when it did, things got more complicated as people were forced to buy more cubits if they wanted to play a game, even an unrated one. So once you lost all your cubits, which happened to me more than once, you can no longer play on the site. Sure, the site's admins gave you free cubits daily but that became pretty tedious. In the worst case scenario, you would find yourself grinding away cubits just to continue playing on the site. It became a burden so I decided to look for greener pastures. And in April 2014, I discovered Lichess.

Lichess had a very sleek and minimilastic design that was aesthetically pleasing and much more convenient to look at. Internet lag was also generally reduced so people wouldn't have too big of a problem if there was a discrepancy in internet speeds. It had faster loading times and a much smoother interface. But the biggest advantage to Lichess was that it's free. You didn't need to pay for virtual currency in order to play an endless amount of games. You could literally just keep playing with thousands of other players.

Now, I write about this because I decided to revisit ChessCube as I still had thousands of my previous games there and I was thinking of downloading the PGNs. However, I was surprised when I saw that things weren't exactly how they looked from the last time I went. Although it has been quite a long time since I checked on ChessCube, but the last time I did, which was last year, it seemed like it was still in operation. When I checked my games though, they were all gone. All the records from my normal games and my tournaments games were wiped from their database. I even looked at my stats and even those turned up with nothing.

So I've been searching about recent events that happened on ChessCube but there was nothing that would explain why they wiped out their user databases. I saw an announcement that they were thinking of upgrading ChessCube and doing all sorts of new things like developing a new chess engine but none pertained to the sudden data cleanup. In fact, for that new project, they were asking their users for donations. That lead me to suspect that, after years of accumulating a bad reputation from their user base, ChessCube finally tanked.

Just to see if my suspicions are true, I decided on a whim to buy some cubits. So I spent $5 for 10,000 cubits and I paid through my Paypal account. When the transaction finished, I logged out my account because for some reason, I couldn't refresh the page. And once I logged back in, my cubits stayed the same which means I've been scammed. I'm not going to lodge a complaint because I know no one will be listening or reading it anyway. But just know that ChessCube is finally dead. Only a few hundred players are still playing there but it's like a wasteland or abandoned area, where only the vultures feed.

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