Just stop, and give the truthful answer to every question : "We, Pokerstars, want more money, and we are taking it out of your pockets."

If the changes you made had sincere motivations, they would be zero sum changes. However, you literally cut everything you could think of and there is absolutely no way you are reinjecting that whole amount into the poker ecosystem. You are simply taking it out and hiring more PR people and train them to give bogus answers to gullible players. So disgusting...

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As much as you may dislike the system, that is nothing like theft/stealing. I'm not inclined to defend PokerStars, but muddying the water with such unreasonable claims only dilutes the valid grievances.

What percentage rebate do you think you 'deserve' for taking the time to try to win other people's money while giving them the privilege of your presence at the table?

Presumably anything above that is just a bonus for jumping through a hoop, take it or leave it?

You guys seem to not know why rakeback exists

Sites could just charge less and give no rakeback, they come up with rakeback idea many years ago because

1) it makes people play more, nice, smart idea to increase volume of play, good for everyone

2) its a way to manipulate the rake increasing without literally increasing rake so dumbs like you dont feel they are paying more for a service

This steps are just manipulation of our money indirectly and you can see how smart it is as you are saying that Im wrong calling this stealing

Yes its stealing. Rake is X so site charges X+Y because he gives you back W so you find ok to be charged X+Y as its good for everyone, but site takes W from you for no reason at all so its the same as increasing X that comes from your deposit = your money

Im not saying about values of X, Y or W, doesnt matter, in theory W can be zero and it would still be stealing, so discussion is not about how much Stars charges or rakeback % is how they made a system to harm players
Its the manipulation of it that is stealing

With this system a player can play all days of year and receive exactly zero rakeback if he stops at 99% of step every month (or the equivalent multiplied by 0.5 which is just Stars saying "we wont take everything because we like you haha")

You make it sound like the VIP Steps/Starscoins are an replacement for the Stellar Rewards, but they're rather an replacement for the old VPP/FPP system.
The stellar rewards are completely gone...

lol, not even close to the mark.

hey matthew, dont know if this has been answered yet but why can we only buy tickets as high as 22 dollars with our coins?
what disadvantage does it give to Pokerstars to let people buy higher tournament tickets with their coins?
Doesn't make a lot of sense to me...

you can buy cash in $25 increments. Cash can be exchanged for a variety of goods and services, including buying in to tournaments. Hope this helps!

if you look on pokerscout, you can see Stars is riding on nice traffic boost since a month or two.

personally, i have a better month $$$ than my last 6 one (didnt play in december). coincidence ? i dunno.

i'm not totally sure but i'm a chrome and siver (some months) and fpp/coins wise, it looks like i make more rakeback than before. i'm quite sad for the stellar tho. but for a chromestar i have nothing wrong to say and i think its their objective.

oh, and look at that hypocrite dwyer guy on that picture lol. ''i just won a tournament and paid rake but i hate the company so i make a sad face and bring a protest tshirt'' wtf lol

what an hypocrite. playing on stars while protesting against stars, great logic. this guy and most of people itt are just basic slaves not even able to quit making business with that company.

No disadvantage, but there is also no advantage for players given they can just buy the $25 cash rewards at the same value. Having said that, we've received similar feedback and will be adding new values shortly to the store: $27, $55, $109, and $215.

Matthew

http://www.pokerscout.com/ Running 7 day average sitting at 17,500 cash players. That has been the average since about when the strike ended. Prior to that for the first 7 days of Jan it was sitting at 16,500.

http://www.pokerupdate.com/news/indu...anuary-1-2015/

Turns out I remembered it as being 20k running average but it was actually 19k, for an 8% yoy decline. Not sure how reliable that article is but it wouldn't be hard for someone with access to Pokerscout historical data to verify it.

No, prior to the strike ending the running 7 day average was at 16.5K, a 13% yoy decline.

The yoy decline is not only (stupidly) unexpected, Amaya's corporate strategy heavily leans on projections of poker growth. They are spending real cash on marketing, new poker product rollouts, and other efforts to grow poker revenues, with the expectation of seeing decent returns on those investments. So far, unsurprisingly, the opposite is happening.

The 13% strike period yoy decline is fairly ominous. A lot of regs right now will be forced to quit in the next 6 months, they just don't know it yet. Lots of people still seem not to fully grasp how sensitive this company is to the slightest kink in their plans, even a sustained 15% traffic decline would be borderline disastrous. If Amaya experiences a 15-30% permanent drop off in poker revenues they will absolutely have to make up for it with their casino and sports offerings. So far they've done a remarkable job of expanding their casino business, imo largely by expanding the casino market as a whole through monetization of their player base. But I suspect that growth from both sports betting and casino will hit a wall as soon as the organic growth from tapping truly new sources of profits, customers who probably weren't already betting with their competitors, wanes giving way to growth caused by directly stealing their competitors market share.

So far they've been tapping a gusher with a 10 foot drill. When that dries up they'll be looking at hydro fracking 2 mile deep shale stone.

I don't understand the new VIP program at all. I made over 5k VPP's this year, but I'm stuck on step 1 (100%) for like a week now. Do I need to manually activate step 2? If so, does that mean I already lost a ton of rakeback?

This is the kind of post that makes most of us cringe. It's a purely emotional rant, it demonstrate ignorance of concepts that have been explained repeatedly, and it's an aggressive attacking style of post. It's embarrassing for you, and it makes the player community look like a bunch of idiots.

once you fill up all of the current starscoin completion bar it will automatically go to step 2. you just happened to look at it while it was at a step 1. once you fill up that current starscoin bar check again, and it should say step 2.

Right, so after 5 steps they start back at 1 and I just happened to look at it when it was 100%? (I hovered my mouse over it and it said 100)

And then I probably looked at it a couple times before, each time it being (close to) 100 but in previous steps? Because I really thought it was full for a while now, but only glanced at it occasionally.

this table talks about step 6, 7, etc, but I guess they restart 1 to 5 over and over.

Thanks either way!

https://www.pokerstars.com/vip/steps/information/

^^^This is the .com step guide. I'm not sure why your step is only worth 3250 coins as it appears that you are supernova. I assume maybe your VIP status isn't based on .com site.

You should be able to find a guide somewhere outlining on your steps.

It'd be nice if there were a summary sheet somewhere, with the dates/times that each step was achieved.

Or maybe there already is one, and I just didn't see it?

Have been using the little progress bar, and requesting playing history audits, to get the info to enter into HM2. Which takes a while to scroll through, so list with just the steps would be nice to have.

Maybe this should go in the Software Suggestion thread - probably should have posted it there, now that I think about it ... d'oh .....

Thisx1000.

Pulling SNE benefits for 2016 was scummy as hell (and indefensible and possibly breach of contract and just downright unfair) but increasing the cost of a product or service is purely at the providers discretion.

All this 'entitlement' bollocks and talk of theft is just embarrassing and demonstrates a lack of any understanding of how the real world works.

As has been said before if you hate it that much take you business elsewhere.

Well, it's the same poster who didn't know why rakeback was introduced, so just made up his own reason.

If any players are 'stuck' on 100% of a Steo, log out of the client and log back in and that should fix it. This is a 1-time thing and it shouldn't happen again. This is only a visual bug, you should have earned StarsCoin for completed steps during the time it was stuck in 100%. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Matthew

Thanks for the reply, It does make sense to just buy the ticket with the cash reward.
Another question for concerning the pokerstars.be site: I tried to look up the Steps program on the site, but I only find the VIP Stellar explanation of last year.
From what I understand, the coins we get when we get to Silverstar is 4*275+1*625 = 1725 coins or 17,25 dollar reward, which is more than last year where we would only get 500*1,5(if u were already silverstar month before) =750 fpps with a value of 11,7 dollar ( = 750*(11/700)). So in that way I can see the VIP Stellar reward has been merged with the coins/fpps. In my opinion that makes the changes not as bad as I thought for silverstar achievement but I would like to look up the steps for Gold and Platinum. Like I said, the pokerstars.be website is outdated so Belgian players can't really look up much information. When will the Belgian website get an update? Thanks

Google is still linking to our old pages - we are still in process of getting redirects and deletions of the old pages.

Go directly to Belgium website and that should have updated info:
http://www.pokerstars.be/en/vip/steps/

Matthew

You missed the 10$ for the Stellar reward!

I know, but u got 10 dollar for 1000 vpps with the stellar rewards, so the adding up from 11,7 to 17,25 dollars this year for just 500 vpps makes that a merge or am I missing something. I know they make more money with the changes, but it isn't as much as I first thought. I cant speak for Gold or higher.

I would like to see a transparent sheet with al the steps and coins players get for every step at all levels, because I cant find that on the site right now.

Is this honestly what you were told to say? This sounds like it's taken straight out of this:



Special emphasis on the "GIVE US YOUR MONEY" part of the picture. The only difference is that instead of directly paying money for the Canadough, Amayastars players pay for their stars coins via rake. You took a form of rewards that required more discipline, less play time and no daily commitments and have replaced it with the exact opposite. You are grooming gambling addicts, or at least trying, and considering the accusations that Amaya is a gambling company not a poker company, it's pretty lol that you're just telling everyone this.

Here's the entire episode in case you want further information on how you sold your soul to the (Canadian) devil:

http://southpark.cc.com/full-episode...mium-isnt-free