English Chess Forum

Good evening everyone,

I am the Communications Director for Agon Ltd. I wanted to address some of the issues that members have been discussing on these forums.
Firstly, I completely understand the frustrations felt over the quality of the coverage on the WorldChess.com website.
If I may, can I tackle the technical issues first to do with connection speed, latency and inability to log into the website.
Yesterday the worldchess.com website was the victim of two denial of service attacks. These attacks involved the website being bombarded by fake traffic which resulted in the disruption of our servers which caused the technical issues which plagued the site yesterday.
Overnight we worked to address the technical issues that these attacks highlighted and took extra measures to protect against further attacks.
Today the worldchess.com website performed significantly better and we did not have a single justified technical complaint. At any given time over the course of today we had well over 100,000 chess fans from all over the world watching the live games without issue.

I also appreciate that there has been a number of negative comments about the game commentary on worldchess.com and about certain other aspects of the broadcast. We are taking on board all constructive criticism and we will be making changes over the next few rounds of the tournament to address many of the comments we have received. We will be the first to acknowledge that the broadcast has not been perfect and we are all working very hard to make it better! Today, for example, we had some great commentary from Vladimir Kramnik.

We do feel that some of the negative comments received on social media platforms have been made by a small number of individuals directly connected to chess websites that are no longer legally allowed to offer the live broadcasting of the moves in the Candidates.

There is obviously a genuine and heartfelt debate to be had about Agon's decision to restrict the live broadcasting of the moves and I am happy to contribute to that debate at the appropriate time and place.

But for now, I just wanted to clarify the events of yesterday concerning the WorldChess website. There is a press release on the Agon Limited website which provides further detail about the denial of service attack: http://www.agonlimited.com/news/2016/3/ ... strictions

I am happy to answer any questions that you may have and I am reachable at [email protected]

Andrew Murray-Watson wrote:without issue

!!!

Andrew Murray-Watson wrote: We do feel that some of the negative comments received on social media platforms have been made by a small number of individuals directly connected to chess websites that are no longer legally allowed to offer the live broadcasting of the moves in the Candidates.

I thought the general view is that you are trying to invent laws that don't exist and overturn the norms of live coverage which predate Agon by many, many years.

Let me ask you a question. It is a common practice on this site, that when discussing a game in progress, we show the position under discussion and the moves leading to that position. Are you asserting that a company based in the British Virgin Islands claims this as a breach of their supposed property?

It's not really enough technical details Andrew to determine how AWS could not deal with the issue.

Andrew Murray-Watson wrote: There is obviously a genuine and heartfelt debate to be had about Agon's decision to restrict the live broadcasting of the moves and I am happy to contribute to that debate at the appropriate time and place.

In court, apparently.

Welcome, Mr Murray-Watson. You've improved my weekend hugely.

This thread now has my full attention. Better than Saturday night at the movies

NickFaulks wrote:

Andrew Murray-Watson wrote: There is obviously a genuine and heartfelt debate to be had about Agon's decision to restrict the live broadcasting of the moves and I am happy to contribute to that debate at the appropriate time and place.

In court, apparently.

Hopefully within FIDE as well. Discussing with Agon seem pointless to me. FIDE however might be able to change the approach in order to avoid alienating their user base. As a person of influence within FIDE I invite you to raise the issue as loud as possible within FIDE. I also wonder what will be the reaction of the ECF towards FIDE. The candidates tournament is ruined, hopefully there's time to fix the world championship later this year.

Incidentally, I find disturbing this being referred to as "Agon decision", should someting like this be "FIDE decision" instead? Agon might be as well gone in a couple of years as happened with many others with similar brilliant ideas for chess, while FIDE will ultimately bear the consequences.

David Robertson wrote:Welcome, Mr Murray-Watson. You've improved my weekend hugely.

This thread now has my full attention. Better than Saturday night at the movies

Thank you! I would say that we are here to entertain, but given the context of recent events, I suspect that would be asking for trouble...

Andrew Murray-Watson wrote:Good evening everyone,
I am the Communications Director for Agon Ltd.

Andrew,

Just so we can understand who is trying to prevent the Candidates games from reaching a multinational audience, is this you?

https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewmurraywatson

Fascinating that Andrew deemed it a priority to post on this forum and not on the "other" one

Brian Towers wrote:Fascinating that Andrew deemed it a priority to post on this forum and not on the "other" one

I told him that this forum was influential.....

Andrew Murray-Watson wrote:We do feel that some of the negative comments received on social media platforms have been made by a small number of individuals directly connected to chess websites that are no longer legally allowed to offer the live broadcasting of the moves in the Candidates

Do you believe that those of us on this Forum who are making negative comments are directly connected to chess websites that would live broadcast?

Brian Towers wrote:Fascinating that Andrew deemed it a priority to post on this forum and not on the "other" one

The DDOS lacks credibility but publishing more details resovles that.

Brian Towers wrote:Fascinating that Andrew deemed it a priority to post on this forum and not on the "other" one

The other place has acemary spam again so no credibility remains over there it should be closed.

Andrew Murray-Watson wrote: We do feel that some of the negative comments received on social media platforms have been made by a small number of individuals directly connected to chess websites that are no longer legally allowed to offer the live broadcasting of the moves in the Candidates.

Do you mean this forum?

Two days ago Dylan McClain threatened EC Forum members that they might be sued and could well "lose everything" just for discussing a game in progress. Is this really the way you choose to interact with chess fans?