With your permission... (From July 2005. Edit/MH.)

[Grummin]

Brandyams,

That's a great idea for after we've hit the ground and are running strong. I'll ask my bizdev team to check out if this is possible. I know squat about money issues.

Doug

[PartyGirlUK]

[ QUOTE ]

3. Buddy lists are a point of contention. What are they really used for? I want to know more about why folks use them, because I never have yet.

[/ QUOTE ]

Buddy lists are useful for keeping track of favorite fish

[Grummin]

Hey Cerano....JoeBoo needs a refill! =)

Awesome insite, sir. You are correct, the "fish" (which I am one of, btw) like to be entertained and need a reason to play on a site. Once they're biting, as it were, then folks from a site such as this should feel at ease to come in and have some fun "teaching them how to play".

Why I value every player's insite into the game (because, let's face it, 10 people who play at the same table are each of them having a different experience than the other), our team will not allow features/tools that could be abused. Nothing would scare the "fish" out of the area quicker than them realizing that a person was using a fish-finder to play the game.

For example, we're still contimplating the buddy list and how to implement this. One the one hand, we want folks to build bonds (because this is a social game). On the other, we'd hate to see it used for "stalking" easy players. I'm curious to hear about comments on this, pro or con.

Douglas

[Grummin]

Hi PartyGirlUK,

We've gathered that and we're not sure that's a good thing from a "fish's" point of view. Right now, we're trying to weigh the desire of a player to find easy marks to the desire of an easy mark to play without being stalked.

Douglas

[PLOlover]

[ QUOTE ]
Awesome insite, sir.

[/ QUOTE ]

[Benholio]

You could make the buddy list system something you can 'opt out' of. That way, if someone doesn't want to be chased around/tracked, they won't be.

Of course, the buddy list implementation won't be much of a positive/negative for a while, unless you are joining an already highyl populated network.

I'll throw my 2c in the area of player notes. Pokerroom has the best note-taking system of all the sites I've played it. What separates it from the rest is that you can quickly add a colored dot type icon to any player (there are 5 or so options, like green, yellow, red, yellow plus, red minus, or something along those lines). This is much better than using the same 'note' icon for all players, since you can quickly identify everyone without having to read each individual note.

Okay, I lied, I have another 2 or 10 cents.

-Sounds: Make sure that you have an 'alerts only' sound option, and that the alerts do a good job. Some networks the alerts are poor, which slows down the play for multitablers, in turn slowing it down for everyone. Bodog, Crypto's, etc, are good examples of how NOT to alert. I never miss an action on Party, though.

-Graphics: Like others have said, have the graphics customizable so that you can have a more plain layout if you want. Also, having re-sizable tables or a mini-view is a BIG plus.

-Multi-tabling: Allowing more than 4 tables to be played is a plus. Worried about adverse effects of mass-multitabling? Just take a look at PokerStars. I can play 8 (or more) tourneys at a time there, so when I do, I don't go looking for another site, and they get all of my action. I like the UB and prima mini-view (UB especially).

-Rewards program / rakeback / incentives: I'm sure this has been covered in this thread, but give customers a good reason to play high volume at your site. Frequent player freerolls (worth more than $1), bonuses for frequent players, frequent player point rewards that are desirable.

Anyway, good luck, and keep us posted.

[Patchmaster]

Poker Room has these little icons you can assign to other players. The icons show up at the table and also in the lobby. It makes it SO much easier to find a good table. They have six icons. More would be better, but even three would be better than nothing. Notes also show up in the lobby when you hover over the note icon. Another nice feature.

Table windows should ideally be resizeable, but at a minimum should be sized so you can get at least four of them on a 1600x1200 screen with ZERO overlap (including the Windows title bar!). It should be recognized that many players will be playing multiple tables in high resolution (and some of them are getting old and their eyes are failing), so any text on the screen should be easily readable at 1600x1200 from three feet away from the screen by someone with vision no better than 20/40. (IOW, don't use small print for the important stuff.)

Others have suggested this, but I'll toss in my vote as well. The tables in the lobby should be filterable so I can easily see only the games I'm interested in and they should sort in a reasonable fashion. The tables should not jump around the list in an incoherent manner or resort themselves spontaneously.

Time to act and disconnects need to be handled in a way that accomodates the person who rarely suffers disconnects yet does not annoy the other people at the table. Poker Room has a horrible system for this, allowing full action time plus 30 seconds to re-connect plus another full action period before timing out a disconnect.

I would like to see a system that provides maybe 15 seconds to act, but also allows the player to actively call "time" and draw from a time bank. Each time a player acts before the 15 seconds is up, a portion of the excess time (maybe 10%) is added to his time bank up to a maximum (60 seconds?). This should keep the action moving but also allow for those times when a player really does need to think about what they want to do.

For no-limit games, come up with some rational system for easily specifying bet amounts. For an example of how NOT to do it, see Pacific Poker. Their slider is next to useless and they even make it difficult to type in an amount. I haven't given this a great deal of thought, but I think a few buttons for multiples of the BB along with a slider calibrated for the size of the pot (1/4, 1/2, 3/4, etc.) would be a good start.

An active and ongoing beta test program. Some sites seem to roll out new software after little more than some light unit testing by the programmers. I've seen major features badly broken and customer support apparently oblivious to the fact software is even involved. There some be an avenue separate from customer support for users to communicate with the programming team.

As others have said, PT-compatible hand histories maintained on the user's computer are very important. Frankly, I've stopped playing at sites that aren't well supported by PT.

The software needs to be efficient. For the life of me, I can't figure out how poker software can be using more CPU time than a first person shooter game, but some of it does. There is no valid reason for this.

And, finally, thanks for asking.

[illogical]

[ QUOTE ]
Hi ImSoLuckyO,

Graphically, this is quite tricky. We played around with it, but we seemed to make more issues than it solved. =)

Douglas

[/ QUOTE ]

If resizable windows can't be done then how about making the game window smaller than 800x600. Make it 640x480 so I can 4 table on my 1280x1024 LCD. [img]/images/graemlins/laugh.gif[/img]

[pokerwisc]

My two cents...

- instant hand histories, like PokerStars has

- if you decide to have a buddy list system, here is a possible way to prevent it from being a "fish finder" -- if you actually have a buddy you want on your list, you type in their screenname or click on it or whatever and the site requests them to accept you as a buddy and they can accept or reject your request to have them on your buddy list... you get the idea

- I read on another post about having kill tables to spark action, how about live straddles?

[zaphod]

Good luck, here are som suggestions:


Have a list of tables that are interesting to me:
-Say i want to play multitable tournaments, but only when there are guarantees about totalprices, and only when the buyin is between 30 and 100 dollar. Get notified about all theese tournaments, but not about 10 and 200 dollar torunaments.

-Get notification when an interesting table comes up(notify me whenever there is a free place at a table with flops seen greater than x. Notify me whenever there is a place free on a table with x amount of dollar per pot)

-Have list with buddies, and list with people you don’t want to play with. Also possibly have icons showing if this person is buddy/”nonbuddy”/Neutral.
-Have strict rule regarding software. No pokersoftware allowed when you are playing a game(after/or before you are offcourse allowed to use software). This will be good for keeping fish.
-When finishing a SNG, get a question asking if you want to automatically rebuy to a similar SNG.
A good setup would be like this:
-In options you could set the software to automatically resize your windows to how many tables you want to play(1-2-4-…). Say you choose 4. Next in options you have the possibility to predefine what your game is(eg 50 dollar SNG/ 6 max 5-10 dollar limit/0.5-1 NL etc..).
When you start playing, and finish one table you automatically gets a question:
-Do you want to leave this game and let us find another table for you? If yes you now automatically goes to an table meeting your preferences, and this game replaces the one that you just left. This way a multitabling SNG player don’t have to spend so much time trying to find free tables, but can concentrate about playing. More time playing means more rake.

Get some really highstake games going occasionally, with some big names playing? This could attract people to come and watch these big guys playing.