Originally Posted by monkeyheaven
Re SNG changes:
I've put some volume on 888 last few months, playing 6m/9m turbos and regspeeds, mixed feelings about the changes.
Removing the old 6m regspeeds which paid top three, benefits all groups: it was a terrible format for regs to get a decent ROI from, confusing to recs that were used to a top 2 paid, an obv target for collusion, inconsistent with your other 6m sngs. WP.
Streamlining the buyins was definitely needed, lobby was a mess previously, I definitely think you should have copied stars and gone 7/15/30/60 though. This keeps more of your old buyin levels that your playerbase is familiar with. By going 5/10/20/30/50 I think, as an example, you'll see an old $15 player reg the new $10s far more often than they reg the new $20s, because the liquidity will always be better at the lower buyins, so everyone's ABI drops, not good for anyone I think. Also, 9mans are hit really hard by these changes, I understand why in your new buyin structure you don't want to offer anything higher than $10 (not enough liquidity for $20s), but if you copied the stars buyin structure you could offer 9mans up to $15, where there was previously enough liquidity at this buyin.
I assume you've copied the new ante structures from stars, but you've (deliberately?) misunderstood the reasoning behind making a change like this. The general view was that players, regs and recs, wanted the games to have more action, ie force nitregs to play more hands. They did not want games to run faster. So they added antes to create action AND SLOWED down the blind structure to keep game duration the same as before. 888 has added antes AND SPEEDED up the blind structure. So, a regspeed now plays like a turbo, and a turbo is closer to a hyper. I don't have a huge issue with this, regspeed games are dying so fine to effectively kill them, but you've increased the rake on these games at the same time. Charging more rake for games that are now way faster, seriously? 888 6max turbo now one of the worst value games online I would think.
Impossible to judge the effect of the changes this soon, whenever stars makes big changes like this, traffic drops initially, plus of course the disconnect issues on 888 will have killed traffic. Maybe more important than anything else, you could focus on having client software and servers that are something other than industry worst?