Letter from Flipside
Monamia - 11:49am Aug 28, 2000 PST
Lead Board Admin.
This is directly from flipside.com:
The number of loyal Case’s Ladder advocates who have taken the time to share their views has been heartening. Your responses have been filled with concerns, hopes, even prayers.
As dedicated players, you have told us you value the unrestrained competitive environment and the chance to play with friends, who have become family because of Flipside.com’s user-friendly technology. (Most of you know that Flipside.com is the product of a merger between PrizeCentral and Won.net)
Our company has been built on generating this type of loyalty and respect for online competition and camaraderie. We have the largest tournament programs among casual game sites and offer more casual multi-player games than anyone on the Internet. As you have heard, we are now restructuring our tournaments to increase the quality of competitive rewards and community support available. We are also modifying our tournament offering. This is both an expensive and labor-intensive activity. As a result, you have been notified regarding our decision concerning the current Case’s Ladder system. We are electing to focus our energy on making Flipside.com the best in the business.
Unlike other sites that have simply dropped the Case’s Ladders system along with its often vocal and competitive community, we are asking our ladder community members to collaborate with us and help us create an improved ladder system. This will obviously require some patience.
Before elaborating on this further, we believe we should first address significant misinformation circulating within this tight-knit ladder community, especially regarding the total number of Case’s Ladder players participating in Flipside.com tournaments.
Tournaments currently account for less than 15 percent of traffic in Hoyle games. About one-third of those tournaments are Case’s Ladder events. Members of this community represent less than 6 percent of all traffic in Hoyle games. In addition the Case’s ladder rooms account for only 8 percent of the total Hoyle player traffic. This is a total of 14 percent compared to our Rated Rooms where traffic is about 25 percent of the total Hoyle traffic. This reference to participant numbers is not to diminish the importance of the Case’s Ladder community here at Flipside.com., but to clarify information.
Incidentally, the highly popular Rated Rooms — which could use a good measure of the competition that exists in the ladder rooms - are available for all flipsiders to compete. These rooms use similar user-friendly technology that has been highly popular with Case’s Ladder participants. At the same time, we are enhancing rewards for Rated Room players.
However, given this continuing enthusiasm for the Case’s Ladder System, we are very interested in developing our own improved Flipside ladder system. With your help it will be the best ladder system in the casual game space. We have already received a large volume of positive and negative comments regarding the Case’s Ladder system. As we explore creating our own ladder system, we want to hear from you regarding how we can improve the ladder system. If you have ways to make our future system better, please email your comments to Ladderthoughts@flipside.com.
For those who remain perplexed, or have continuing questions regarding this transition from the Case’s Ladder system, we will respond to your concerns and provide routine updates and FAQs on the message board. You can view the message board at http://www.won.net/community/boards - then, click on the Hoyle Card and Board Section and read the folder "Update on the Ladder System."
Finally, as dedicated players and competitors who we value and respect, we again ask for your patience as we diligently work toward building an exciting and challenging Flipside.com ladder system that is the best on the Net.