Arenas

Why don't the time control of official arenas have increment, whereas, according to some famous GM "chess without increment ought to be called a mere variant"?

OTB and online are very different beasts. I do agree that OTB increment is necessary. But playing online with instant moves is like playing with increment.

Totally agree @lovlas and @TeddyTheTurkey lichess does host increment arenas if you are interested. Just not all of them have increment.

Yes but maybe you're forgetting that some of us prefer to play with increment and play generally slower time controls.

It's good to provide for everybody.

And remember most of us play for fun, including in arenas, and not to win the tournament. We just want to come, jump in, play a few games and then go when we please. That's why arenas are good.

I mean, it's totally fine to make no-increment arenas. But I think it should be fair to do also increment arenas (as far as I remember the only ones with increment are 3+2, what about Rapid for instance?)

Unfortunately (to my disappointment) increment does make pairing times less predictable and thereby results in slower pairings. I do believe that below 2000, online players learn best when using an increment.

How about adding increment to some of the bigger tournaments, then? All the variant shields are 3+2 so why not Blitz Inc Shield and especially Rapid Inc Shield (and not "mostly 5 0 if you want to win it" Shield)?

@Toadofsky the problem also comes from the pairing algorithm then. It has been pointed out several time that it is inefficient in small arenas, but that doesn't seem to be a priority of Lichess devs.

@TeddyTheTurkey Please refresh my memory with regard to what these inefficiencies are. I've spent hours analyzing pairing code and the only inefficiency I observe is that rematch pairings are blocked.

@Toadofsky The following situation happened to me more than once: only four players joined the arena. All four are connected and their name is in the chat. No game is going on and no pairings for something like one or two minutes.