Quote:
Originally Posted by xLAGERTHAx
FYP.
I'm not even close to being a "Shill' for PP or anyone else for that matter.
Just because I often see things from a different perspective and the bigger picture, doesn't mean i'm siding with or defending PP.
You wan't to talk about 'inane' posts - suggesting banning entire countries because of Bot accounts is the definition of inane (especially when you factor in that there are players from many other countries outside of the ones mentioned who have also been using Bot's on PP).
I'm running a shop. People from Country A come in, some spent a little bit of money, some spend lots of money, some are return customers, some tell their friends how good my shop is. Country B does the same, Country C does the same etc. Country D however, almost none of the customers from Country D buy anything, but they fill up my shop space of actual customers from A-C who can't enter and do what they want. Out of the small portion of D buyers, most don't return. When i've looked into the shop floor going-ons in more detail, most of the people from Country D don't buy anything because they are stealing products, costing me money and preventing actual customers from buying and using my service.
It doesn't seem that crazy to carpet ban Country D from entering my shop, even if 1% of Country D are proper customers. I have also noticed 1% of Country C is shoplifting - clearly banning Country C would be silly - but now I can focus my efforts on catching the offenders and banning specific players.
While I don't think banning a whole country is a good idea, or one that party will do (I actually think Party doesn't care about bots, and potentially even likes bots because I think their player pool would drop a huge % if all the bots were removed and the recent bans were were a surface 'look what we are doing to keep you safe' and one reason for the ecology changes are to help cover up the state of their games), I don't think it is that unreasonable.
Certainly Party have much greater access to deposit/withdrawal/poker history of their customers, but if they found there was a country that withdrew far more than they deposited, had very few losing accounts, had accounts that mostly just jumped into low-mid stakes and were winning and played suspiciously then banning that county doesn't seem as bad a proposal.
I have been playing tournaments and supporting party for the past few years, mostly as I no longer play for a living and wanted smaller fields where tournaments wouldn't take my whole evening. As party has grew, this has become less ideal for me but I still have supported and welcomed most of the changes.
However, the more I've played cashgames, the more suspicious I get. Opening Party and Stars and comparing country breakdown for specific limits often shows very different distribution, coupled with the actual bot creators promoting party as an 'easy target', first hand accounts from bot makers who actively run bots on party still and haven't been caught and suspicious plays at the table makes me think the bot issue is still there, and more of an issue than Party are letting on.
In an ideal world, I fully support Rob Yong's ideas, and if I felt comfortable that Party were actually actively trying to catch bots, were able to catch and ban bots and would keep the games as bot free as possible (at least as good as Stars do) then I would happily welcome no HUDs/anon tables/whatever changes they want.
I do doubt this will happen, and certainly would not be recommending party to anyone for cashgames and depending what happens on the site after all the upcoming changes they might be losing me as a customer for good.