New Game opened on a single variant for everyone, which reads poorly on VK
where Russian Scrabble is the familiar game. A registered account now starts
with both Russian-alphabet games, so the picker offers a real choice with no
pre-selection.
A guest stays on Erudit alone and is invited to register for the rest: the
device-local guest has no profile at all, so the client-side fallback has to
keep matching the server. Registering promotes the set, but only while the
guest still carries the untouched guest default. Existing accounts are not
backfilled — the set they carry may be a deliberate choice.
The Telegram promo start-param becomes additive rather than a replacement,
with English Scrabble withheld from a Russian-speaking arrival; otherwise the
English campaign link would have taken Russian Scrabble away from every
account it onboarded.
The promo bot button carries a configurable variant-seed start-param (default verudit_ru-scrabble_en). The gateway parses start_param from the validated initData and forwards it; the backend, on first contact only, seeds the new account variant_preferences from it (English Scrabble alongside the default Erudit).
No schema change (the scrabble_en CHECK is already in the baseline) and the gateway<->backend REST field is additive, so the rolling deploy is safe in either order. TELEGRAM_PROMO_START_PARAM configures the payload (empty forwards the user own /start payload). Covered by account unit tests, a gateway transcode test, and an integration test asserting new-only seeding.
Ilia Denisov