Now that the Stars Rewards loyalty program has been live for over 18 months, we’ve had the opportunity to gain a much better understanding of how players engage with it. This, as well as player feedback, has informed our decisions on how to evolve the program, and where to focus our investments.
With these findings in mind, we intend to make a series of changes to Stars Rewards which will be rolled out throughout 2019. The first change will be implemented on Friday, February 15, when the reward point earning rate for scheduled tournaments will change from 100 reward points for every $/€1 in tournament fees paid to 45 reward points. All other formats are unaffected and will continue to earn 100 reward points for every $/€1 in rake paid. This is a reduction in the overall amount of rewards some players will receive, but made in an area that we believe will have the least impact on their experience and enable us to place even more focus where we know it matters most. This includes offering the largest tournament guarantees like the €20m Winter Series guarantee in Southern Europe as well as record-breaking COOPs and Sunday Millions, and providing the most exciting live event experiences in poker.
Later this year, we intend to roll out several improvements to the Stars Rewards experience aimed at addressing the most common point of customer feedback we receive: that the experience of opening a Chest isn’t as meaningful as it could be. We will also take steps to simplify the core elements of Stars Rewards to make it easier and more intuitive for customers to understand. We will address these areas by making the following changes:
-Adjusting the frequency and value of Stars Rewards Chests. The value of each Chest will be more than tripled, with the frequency of earning them reduced by a similar factor.
-Removing the ‘boost’ feature as an always available feature and transferring the majority of the value customers earned from the boost into the value inside the Chests themselves.
-Implementing new, easier to understand rules for how customers move up and down the 6 Chests levels. Moving up a Chest level will be achieved by earning 10 Chests over a rolling 28-day period and every progress bar will have a 28-day expiry to compete (failing to complete will move you down a Chest level).
-The addition of a new ‘Exchange’ feature which will let players who are struggling to complete their progress bar in a reasonable amount of time the option to trade in their partial progress for an immediate reward.
As always, we welcome your feedback and will be keeping our ear to the ground on all the most popular poker community channels and forums to learn from your experiences. A year-and-a-half in, we’d like to thank you for your support as we continue to evolve the program.
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