[jetset]

I agree with Gunslinger that 120Sam's thoughts are worth reading on this issue, as are the contributions of many others here such as Kavaman and Scrollock.

There's an earlier post here somewhere that linked Joyland with Monaco Gold and Club Dice, and interestingly those operations were recently purchased for $40 million by Noam Lanir's Empire Online, shortly after its successful IPO.

I suppose it is possible that this change is having these crazy repercussions we're experiencing, but as this deal was only announced early this month/late July I doubt that operational matters such as this would have been influenced already.

Concerning the Playtech channel, you will recall that when Montana was set up it was initially excruciatingly slow and bad at communicating, but I think its fair to say it has improved - it's not up to gold standard but there has been some improvement.

Handling player disputes is not as easy as it might appear, and if Playtech are sincere about this, their channel will receive more attention and exhibit better standards of customer sensitivity and real mediation, rather than playing tennis with emails to its casinos and the players.

BTW, this predilection for telephone calls permeates much of the industry - there are plenty folks in online casino land who try the smooth patter on the phone rather than the hard and recorded fact of email exchanges!