December VIP offers

[alekhine8]

I asked, and the Party representative said 12,000 raked hands at limits $5/$10 or above. It was not based on Party points or anything like that.

I asked about a partial bonus and the rep said no. I asked about a prorated bonus f I played above and beyond my 12,000 hand offer. The rep said no, unless it was significant (he mentioned doubling my requirement). The funny thing was when the rep said if I doubled my offer, my bonus would not necessarily double as the formulas are determined by the marketing group, whomever they are.

[Catt]

Thanks.

[ QUOTE ]
The funny thing was when the rep said if I doubled my offer, my bonus would not necessarily double as the formulas are determined by the marketing group, whomever they are.

[/ QUOTE ]

I know lots of folks here think it's fun to bash Party for a lot of the seemingly stupid things they do (you're not in any way doing this - I'm just using your quote as an introduction for my soapbox), but I tend to think that in a business this size, they tend to have reasonably good people who know what they're doing and are doing things that are good for the business but that look a bit silly to those of us on the outside.

However, I must admit that I am beginning to drift to the analogy of the "it's rigged" view with regard to Party's management by thinking that "the marketing group" really is a group of drooling idiots. This program, as viewed from a player's perspective, is very poorly run -- labor intensive without the cooresponding benefits one would expect for the business by investing all this labor, and communicated in a way that is confusing at best and outright contradictory at less than worst. The only explanation for the interminable delays and incompetence that makes any sense to mme is that Party is watching revenue numbers very closely on a daily basis and is trying to play with 6 different levers as the month wears on in order to spend the least but still hit the top-line numbers (i.e., Santa pack, football thingy, reload bonuses, VIP program, etc.) Just seems to be very poorly run.

Poorly run is an understatement.
A third of the month has gone by and we don't know what is what.This is not poor it is pathetic.
They should be working on January's offers now and not in Febuary.

[AA suited]

"This [VIP] program, as viewed from a player's perspective, is very poorly run -- labor intensive without the cooresponding benefits one would expect for the business by investing all this labor, and communicated in a way that is confusing at best and outright contradictory at less than worst."

agreed about labor intensive. it's one thing if the vip labor were the $0.10/hr drones from india. it's another when they are from England $$$.

(yes i asked... the VIP person i talked to said she's located in England)

in this day and age of computers and actuary programs, i am surprised a billion dollar company is doing stuff by trial and error.

create a simple model (hire a math professor from Oxford), plug in some #'s (weekly offers), and adjust. then try to extrapolate that data into monthly offers.

[Catt]

Yeah. Especially since they have info on the response to previous promotions (reloads, etc.) over years and years of play. Even if they are trying to fine tune the quarter, there's no logical reason that this sort of promotional / loyalty program should be even close to this level of complexity / confusion / cost. Again, I don't want to disappear down the rabbit hole of "they're idiots" but I'd surely be interested if I were running marketing / a manager in marketing resonsible for this program's budget / a manger responsible for this program / a finance person allocating for this promotion / a director / a stockholder / etc. -- just makes no sense.

[alekhine8]

My favorite part is that they can't even put a system in place to show you how many hands you have played towards your goal.

How hard would it be for them to add a VIP section to the account website page so that we could keep track of this stuff?

Oh well.

[MicroBob]

Very well put....much better articulated than when I tried to say mostly the same stuff (but took about 6x longer to do so).


Not only are there all those issues of making it harder than it should be, etc etc...but they are actually HURTING their own profit and their players' motivation.

Tell the player they he gets $500 after 12k hands and that they have to play the full 12k to get the bonus.
that's all fine and dandy as far as I care.
But why wouldn't you want to pro-rate it for AFTER 12k hands to encourage more play? Do they want their players to stop playing at a certain point?
Just saying, "You'll get an additional $100 for each 2400 hands you play above and beyond 12k" would get generate increased play from their players which is, I thought, what they wanted.

It seems to me that the reason they are not doing this (or...have stopped doing this, since they were attempting to do something like this before) is become some management person there said, "No. It's too complicated to have to sit there and figure it out for each player. Just give them one goal to reach and that's it."

It's as if they have to sit there with big charts and do all the calculations by hand and they just don't want to be bothered to figure out what the full payment should be for someone who plays 24,623 hands at an incentive rate of 3.75-cents per hand.

this is the 21st century.
It's not that complicated.
Make it automated (unless for some reason Party actually doesn't WANT to make a better profit and encourage their players to play more).


FWIW - haven't gotten an offer. My phone's been acting weird though...but pretty sure they didn't try to call me.

[jrbick]

I agree that they should do what you describe in your post. Last month's offer had at least the element of those ideas in that they set a base goal of xxxx points for x amount of money, but if you did about 1/3 more in points (I think it was close to that) then you would get a larger bonus.

Pro-rating w/o much of a cap on the bonus would certainly serve as greater motivation to play.

[gila]

What is the email address to request VIP memmbership?