Playing as a Guest

I had to make an account to log in to this forum (gross). I hate having to play with a logged-in account. Can I just play as a guest? The site used to rate players, logged in or not, and you could pair yourself with players of similar skill levels. But starting in late November or so, they seem to have removed that feature, and the remaining pool of players seems far less sportsmanlike. People in losing positions will leave the screen rather than make a move or resign, forcing you to wait until the entire time control runs out or resign a winning position just to match with someone who will actually play the game. Even when starting a game there is about a 50/50 chance that the other player will simply not make a move at all or make the first one to three moves and then leave the game, again forcing you to abort or resign to find a new match.

Then the site removed the ability to easily export matches to the analyzer, forcing you to login to review your matches and see where you made mistakes. Which wasn't, like, that awful, because you could still manually copy the movelist into the analyzer for particularly troublesome games.  But now the site doesn't even save your movelist? I guess this site wants people only to play when logged in? 

Can someone in charge please restore functionality to guest matches that the logged in players use? I get that this may be a resources issue, but seriously. I do not want to log in to play.

Hmm, I never played as a guest here but I don't see how the site could have possibly rated you if you weren't logged in. A rating takes many games to approach accuracy. There would have to be a way of identifying you.

They did add the play as a guest feature last October, which is about when The Queen's Gambit series came out. 

They also added the ability for new members to self-rate at some point last year, so it's possible they assigned you as a guest to play with higher rated players based if your self assessment if you said you were an advanced player.

Each guest gets a theoretically unique guest login ID like Guest123456, etc. Granted, it resets every time you flush your cookies and I think when you close your browser (I haven't checked the latter), but the rating wasn't the big deal for me. Not having the rating seems to put you in games with people who don't actually play through matches in much higher frequency, whereas when they had the rating assigned (even to guests) at least people finished their games (or resigned when they were losing or had to leave).

Also, the game sometimes "abandons" mid-match even when it's your turn now and says you abandoned the game (rather than your opponent), though thankfully this doesn't happen often. I usually understand those to mean there was a server disconnect somewhere where the site logs whose turn it is. 

Do the site managers actually read this forum?

Yes, though I won't say every topic gets read. Since the guest system likely has fluctuations in who is playing, you can get a lot of bad sports along with good ones. 

It's just likely more bad sports are now playing as guests.

So did this site just completely disable playing as a guest?

No, it's still there.

I was only able to start 3 min. blitz for awhile, and then it reverted back, and then it wouldn't let me play at all. Now it's back to 3 min. blitz. What's the deal?

And back to not being able to play at all. Literally any option to play as guest the site tells me to login.

Is it possible to see past games played as guest in the android app of chess.com?

OP I hear you.  A year ago Guest play was a good tool for low stress practice and actually having fun playing chess.  But just as you say, helpful features were removed and what's worse, Guest is choked full of streamers, cheaters. stallers, and various lowlife characters that make it a waste of time.  I play in the Beginner forum with a 10-minute time control.  However, there are very few actual beginners there, and epic numbers of highly-rated Bullet players, among others.  Back when rating appeared as you stated, I defeated one player rated 1426 and another rated close to 1600 (my luck and their carelessness - I created a post about these some time back).  1426 and 1600 are not beginners.  And so, using my experience today as an example, to get 16 fair games, I had to wade through and abort 26 (because I am sick to death of Scholar's Mate from players who disconnect as soon as I defeat it), resign another 12 (playing white against Bullet players), and abandoned 6 (cheaters).  

tl;dr the site has declined, immensely, both in terms of functionality and the quality of people, here.  Read the forums: the best and most helpful players no longer post on this site.  But hey, "check out our ad revenue!"

As far as I'm aware, first accounts get recycled after a while and there is no saved archive like an account would have.

op is right