Great that Party took on board feedback from here, via Colette, and put in bigger cash rewards ($500 and $1k). Shame that in doing so they entirely missed the point. Let's spell it out once more, Party: people could just buy 5 of the $200 reward if that's what they wanted. They whole idea of asking for a bigger reward was that you would reward people paying insane amounts of rake with a slightly bigger return.
Worse, though, is the fact that most of the cash reward are available only to Palladium, and none are available to Bronze/Silver players. There is ZERO sense in this. No Palladium player is going claim the $100 rewards - they'll be raking so much that 1500 points is negligible and they may as well get a far better return on 1800 points instead.
In advance I figured the point of these changes (and capping rakeback at 22.22%) was that you'd be distributing more of the money to recreational players, in an effort to improve traffic. Instead, all you appear to have done is to implement a system that suits no-one.
It won't even help Party. When Colette announced the changes I started weighing up whether it might be time for me to bring most of my play back from Stars to Party. It's now clear there's no reason for me to do so.
What's most disappointing, though, is that Colette (on our behalf) has (presumably) been spun the same line that we have been spun in the past (i.e. wait and see; things will be better, not worse. Promise!) I still have 20k points left from when cash was removed last time around, which led to me taking most of my play to Stars. The worst thing about those changes was that we weren't allowed to make an informed decision and therefore lost substantial value overnight; sad to see that the same has happened this time.
I do fear that unless Party rethinks the store urgently its traffic is going to drop off a cliff. All that will be left will be a few Palladiums, and they're not going to be happy.
Party - if you ever decide that listening to what players actually want might help your business strategy (clue: it's not Casino bonuses) then there will be plenty of players here to represent the Palladium end of things. I'd be happy to thrown my name in as someone unlikely to grind that much but a typical Bronze-Gold player who used to play exclusively on Party and now puts rakes 95% of his rake through Stars instead. Having played on Party for 10+ years I still have (incredibly) some degree of brand loyalty; I'd hope that I (or one of the other players here in a similar position) might be a customer group you want to listen to.
In the short-term, though, the solution might be to:
- reconsider the $500 and $1k cash returns (if they don't return better value than $200) then they serve no purpose other than making Party look stupid
- open all rewards to everyone*
*You might find that some recreational players are happy to play at Silver level for a few months, say, to work towards a reward (hey look! more rake for Party and a better ecosystem for everyone). People might think this takes away the point of grinding enough to hit bigger tiers but you can address that with slightly differential pricing/rakeback. The real win is pulling money in at the bottom of the ecosystem, without which everyone's stuffed.
Colette: your performance as PartyRep in the last couple of months has been brilliant. It's a massive, massive improvement on the lip service paid in the past to players' concerns. Please keep up the good work. But in doing so, bear in mind that only three things really matter:
- the buggy software and server performance;
- the dire CS responses (particularly non-VIP CS coupled with inability to escalate or apparently think about issues); and
- the rakeback structure.
Part of the solution is simply to engage with these issues. Another part will be easy wins that cost Party relatively little and start bringing back traffic. The MTT announcement pop-ups is an obvious example: remove them (as we've been requesting - not for months, but years) and in the background do some software development work so in the longer run you can have a system that promotes tournaments in the way you want to without making poker utterly unplayable in the first place.
I'm not really sure why the powers that be can't see the cost-benefit analysis here. They have one of the very few poker brands that can conceivably compete with Stars. Even if they prefer a casino and don't want to run poker, someone else will want to. Why not hive off the poker entirely if you're not going to run it as a serious business?