My thoughts are that this will not achieve the desired result, and you will just have the same group of players (myself included) who only play tournaments (and some regular tables on the last day of each month) to still only play tournaments.

As things stand, from a points perspective, regular tables are a complete waste of time. You can play for half an hour on a 0 or 100 table with the available people and win significantly less points than you'd win by lagging out of a tournament which lasts less time.


As there is a smaller pool of players in timezones outside of the US, my guess is we'll see a significant increase in their scores, and a more modest increase in the scores of US players with more competition.

I Expect to see a small handful of players now gaining 5k-10k per night every night between midnight at 6am est. We'll see though :p

some good points fiero...after discussing w/ ryan and another mod, we thought it would most likely be easier to increase the tournaments since so many ppl play them and hope that players will help w/ trying to get ppl to start playing more table games also...going to be some baby steps and trying some different things in hope to get good results.

my recommendation for table game increase would be to add a bot to the 100 and 500 tables as well.

facebook login is working again also

Thank you Greg for your stubborn work here.

Thank you for the support, stamina and congratulations to the success. It is good to see that the site is not left for good.

2 not completely thought over ideas I'd like to throw in:

a) Tourneys
While basically erased limits are nice on the one hand to get tourneys going, on the other hand it will make scoring to tourneys more difficult.
A 3rd on a freeroll (with 3 joining e.g.) used to be a good start to play 500 afterwards. Seeing the same (very good) players winning the increased number of freerolls will decrease the number of players that would be able to play 500 and above.
Still those players had no reason to play regular tables.
How about a new entry requirement for tourneys? Like, you can play a freeroll, before you play the next freeroll you need 10 regular games. You need to play 10 games at 100 minimum between two 100 tourneys. 10 games at 500 for the next 250 and so on.
I have no reasoning for the number 10, it is just the idea that might be discussed.

b) Dynamic table limits.
This has been discussed before. I think it is fine to play 0 table with 50k points if there is nobody around to play at higher levels. However, I've seen 0 tables filled with 7 players, each around 10k. This imho is not ok.
If there is a sufficient number of players logged in to play 100/500/2k, these players have to go to those tables.
There are 2 points to that: You have to define the points from which this automatism grabs. It might be ok to not play 500 if you have 501 point - this looks different with 5k. The limits have to be defined. In addition, you have to auto-logout people that are not active. Else you might have 7 players logged in with 10k, 6 of them are sleeping and the last one can't play as none of the other 6 will sit with him. This could be realized by noticing "no click" for 20 minutes - logout.

Just 2 ideas to get regular tables filled at all (a) and at higher levels (b).

I feel like this would be complicated, but I feel that there should be no points penalty for players that get eliminated in a standard game before their first turn.

fiero, louis and critical...thx for the input and i am keeping all these notes to bring up in future meetings w/ Ryan. For now we are trying to get all the functions of both sites back to par. I hope to get a regular mod here also very soon. As far as the table play, we have lost lots of table play also due to tournaments. The best things is that we all work together and try to get players to play tables. We have had to do the same on gpokr. It might take awhile , but i have confidence w/ the changes and meetings with ryan once per month will hopefully bring some positive results. Please post any ideas that you have and i will forward to ryan during the meetings. thank you all

@CD:
I fully agree with that thought. But we all know, that some people will at some occasions refrain from eliminating a player, just to have the point loss happening. And we have to make sure that flagging out will not save you.
A solution (no idea how to implement it) might be that either you get killed in turn 1 or you flag out with 1 land before moving in turn 2... In both cases, no pointloss.

these may all be nice fine-tuning ideas worth discussing, but imo they won't improve the game experience much if they don't fix the lags and in-game log-outs issue first. these two are the only things that have made me seriously consider quitting the game.