Dear PartyPoker,
You have applied many changes to your brand as of late, many which are illadvised.
Perhaps out of desperation, seeing as you're a declining brand, you've brought upon these changes. Hoping that by taking action, even if such actions may be unwise, you're going to perhaps turn things around or at least impress one of your superiors, shareholders or whoever you or your team (whoever designed & implemented these changes) are held responsible to. Perhaps out of sheer luck, one of these implementations will produce temporary good results, an increase in revenue and you're rewarded with either a promotion or at the very least, praise. Unfortunately, as in poker, your results are subject to variance and many of your decisions will be -EV, even if they at first might appear to produce positive results. What makes this an actual problem is because none of your actions will have immediate effects, which is probably why you can continue to make new mistakes without repercussions as it will be difficult to attribute data to the right action due to all the mathematical noise.
Your brand will continue to decline no matter what you do, because sadly you're in a declining industry. However, I believe that many of your decisions are actually speeding up this rate of decline.
I'll touch upon the following changes and offer my opinion on the matter.
##Anonymous Hand Histories##
Wanting to create a more fair environment for all of your players, you decided to severly cut the effectiveness of HUDs by making hand histories anonymous. I assume your main focus here was to appease potential recreational players who might feel uncomfortable knowing that some of their opponents might have access to HUDs. It is either that, or you're under the impression that by making it more difficult to gather information on your opponent, particularly recreational players, you can increase the marketing dollar value of each new player you bring onto the site by making it less likely that they're targetted and as a result are emptied of cash at a slower rate, resulting in more rake.
A) Few recreational players are aware of HUDs and those that are, do not care enough for it because they can't bother themselves to learn how to use one. (For HUDs are available to everyone - Fair Competition), which makes it unlikely that this will have any positive impact on your bottom line in that regard.
B) The assumption that regulars rely on stats to a high degree to beat the fish is a common misconception. The value of stats only change going from one category to another, having 30-100 hands (category 1) on a player is sufficient to identify whether or not you're dealing with a professional or a recreational player. Any number of hands between 100 and 5000 (5000+ = category 2) is of limited value, which means your HUD restrictions do not make much of a difference since most players can quickly amass a couple of dozen of hands on each player just to identify who it is that they're actually playing. Having more hands than that is largely irrelevant (exceptions do exist of course), because unless you see values of extreme deviation your confidence interval isn't going to be very high and its value in decision making very low.
This means that HUDs are primarly tools used against other professional players, since you'd only get into category 2 or higher against other regs, and are of little consequence to and against recreational players. As long as HUDs remain available to everyone, it remains a fair and competitive environment.
The restriction of HUDs is not going to increase the dollar value of your marketing efforts.
What unfortunately, results of your implementation is that, by restricting huds, you actually create a more unfair environment because now a new market comes into existence, having a HUD against a professional who does not have a HUD against you (hand converters), is far more consequential for your players than merely reducing their effectiveness. You have in a sense removed the democracy and fairness on your site by regulating the software without the ability to enforce your regulation, concentrating power in fewer individuals. (Analogy: Artificial Intelligence - OpenAI was created for this very reason, to make AI open source, since it is clear that by restricting the access to AI, you create an environment in which it is more likely that someone is to gain a truly overwhelming advantage with potentially catastrophical results)
Now, there are other alternatives, and they're especially important now that you've created this unfair competive situation where a certain number of players have access to hand converters (from talking to various developers, it seems we're looking at somewhere between 50-150 active users of hand converters. They're likely to make up a fairly high percentage of hands played as these will be some of the most active players on your site, an estimated 20-50% of hands involve at least one player using a converter).
My favorite solution to the above issue (it is a critical issue), which not only makes it difficult for players using converters to gain a worthwhile edge on other professional players, it will also make it possible for your recreational players to counteract HUDs, which seems to be an important thing to you (although, I think it is of little consequence to your bottom line). Is to copy the strategy applied at MPN/Microgaming, which gives players the option to change their nickname once every 30 days or every 1000 hands played. It works very well on microgaming, if a player is concerned about how much information their opponents might have gathered on them, they can simply choose a new nickname, this concern means players change nickname about once every two months on average. It gives people options, it allows people to still use HUDs (which can make the game more interesting) to a decent extent while giving the players who prefer others not to track them the option to counteract that at will.
P.S I do agree with counteracting datamining services by making players anonymous to observers, since datamining hands is what will bring the value of huds into category 3 (50-100,000+).
##Removal of Global Waiting List##
A global waiting list offers no advantage to any person in particular. It is a tool of convenience, a tool which allow players to open up more tables and keep the liquidity of your games high. Right now, it seems that the option is only partially working, but words from the PartyPoker support seem to indicate that you're in the process of removing the waiting lists, rather than just fixing the glitch.
This is a mistake, for no advantage is gained through a global waiting list (for it is a global, not a table-specific waiting list) and removing it only serves to make some of your players lives more miserable, meaning that fewer games will run, and less revenue will be amassed.
The bigger problem however, is similar to that of anonymising hand histories. Removing access to a global waiting list, means once again, that you're monopolizing seat selection to the players who have access to seating scripts (discussions with developers seem to indicate that the number of active users of seating scripts are between 12-50 at the moment).
As long as a global waiting list exist, none has a real advantage over one another meaning that the value of seating scripts will remain limited. If one wishes to join a new table, he signs up on the waiting list and takes whatever table is given to him. The removal of this option means that those players who are using seating scripts will have gone to having almost no discernable advantage over any other player (as everyone had access to the global waiting list) to having a massive advantage. The value of seating scripts is about to skyrocket. People will be incentivized to begin cheating once again, thanks to your implementations and the majority of your players will suffer as a result, further damaging your brand.
##Changing of VIP system##
I will briefly touch upon this even if I don't necessarily consider it a mistake as we haven't yet received much information about it, but just to voice some concerns of mine.
Your VIP system is indeed a mess, and you could improve it. Whether improving it means reducing the value of it, I can't say. Reducing the value might improve your margins but lower your revenue, so how much of an impact that would have on your bottomend I can't guess without having access to more data.
Changing the VIP system would be a good thing, for an outdated VIP shop makes few players happy, especially as we're limited to only receiving 500$/month in cashback, resulting in thousands of dollars of rakeback being stored up for your higher rakers simply due to illogical constraints placed in your system. Plus the fact that one has to go about this process manually is in itself both annoying and to the less technically savvy players, difficult.
Whether increasing or decreasing the value of your VIP system would improve your bottomline, I can't say. I myself, for obvious reasons would prefer if you increased the value, rather than decrease it.
However, what I can say is this: If you decide to decrease the value of your VIP system, tread lightly for a too drastic decrease will damage the liquidity of your games. This is especially dangerous, because at first, it will produce good results making you deluded and blind as all you can see is short-term profits. My point is that you will actually see an improvement in your bottomline, but that trend will quickly reverse and before you know it, you'll regret your decision (or you won't, because the results will take too long to compound for you to realize what your mistake was, and whoever implemented the idea had already received a promotion for it).
P.S I don't know if this goes against regulations, but if you do not let the players who have a large amount of points stored up (as a result of the one bonus/week restriction) convert their points to cash before you wipe the system. Your brand will suffer because of a highly tarnished repuation (a reputation which is declining faster & faster as we speak)