I hope you don't include me as someone accusing you of scaremongering. My points have only ever been that the sites have plenty of time to deal with this well for players, there is no need to boot without notice, no need to leave players disadvantaged in any way. Sorting or shifting players to UK registered partners of each of the major networks should be easy, if anything the transfer should be an event triggering some incentive....if the firm is any good or is competent. The blame for any disadvantage or sudden change is with the site.
I would also like to do a bit of scaremongering of my own:
So far we have tales of UK players being inconvenienced as sites choose to pull out of the UK market but there is the reverse of this - the sites that opt for UK operation but who then pull out of some grey or black markets to let them have a UK licence.
It will not be just UK players being bounced between sites, facing lock outs or transfers, for those that stay in the UK they may be annoying some non UK players any day now and those are likely to be the larger more established brands/sites.
Again there is no need for the sites to mess this up, no need to disadvantage or inconvenience players, it is a simple migration, all that is needed is good communication/customer service for a long warned of change.
For UK players the 16th September deadline for applications for a UK continuation licence gives us the crunch date. By then all sites will know which way they have jumped on this. Any site that is keeping players in the dark after this date is being very dubious. Any milking players without notice that they are pulling out between 16th Sept and the go live of the new regime on 1st October is frankly rogueish,
Certainly not, if anything, your take on this makes this far more than merely "A UK issue". With Vegas Partner Lounge, it's Canadian and Australian players that are also experiencing a migration to a single country specific brand. Their screwup is not so much with the casino side, but with the multi player side, which is down to Microgaming not having properly prepared and tested what they should have expected to be a common process for many of it's licensees for the changes in the regulatory approach we are now seeing in many countries, not just the UK. In fact, France and Spain went through this process before the UK, yet no lessons were learned, UK players are mostly seeing the same overnight booting and messed up transfers that French and Spanish players were complaining about.
Whilst they can justify not being able to give a month or two of advance warning, they must surely have several days lead time between making the decision to boot UK players on a given date, and actually implementing the software changes that boot the players from a country no longer being accepted.
Now we UK players know how this is being implemented by the industry, we have to assume that the most likely "notice" we will get is finding our accounts blocked the first time we log in after such a change has been implemented. This can happen at any time this summer. Even sites that haven't booted us by 16th September cannot be assumed to be staying in the UK, they could hang on till the bitter end, and a few could be planning to flout the UK rules knowing there is little the UK can do to stop them.
The only sure way UK players can know where they stand is seeing the compulsory logo for the UKGC licence on the casino's website, and being able to click it to check the validity of the claim. Currently, this type of information has not been made available to the public as we are still in the transition period.
Royal Vegas are still sending me promotional emails as though nothing has changed, yet we know that on the last cruise, they were telling their VIP players from the UK that this would be their last cruise as the UK would be "booted" before the next one.
Those that accused me of scaremongering were doing so because they believed that things would be different for the UK changes, and that UK players would be dealt with "professionally", and would not suffer changes or lock outs with no notice, nor have their money "disappear" in the process. There is already a report that the change at VPL caused money to "disappear" due to the messed up migration of the MPV tournaments, this being a payout for a daily tournament on the last day that UK players were allowed on the skin.
Since we now know that this is going to be an issue with MPV during a migration, it could hit other players who begin a tournament and then find they are booted from that particular skin before the tournament ends and prizes are credited. This is why I am steering clear of the Royal Vegas MPV, even though they keep sending me promotions about them.
A certain German forum will know how to spot me, they have a thread devoted to the tournament scene, and Crazyweather became infamous there for unseating the repeating winner SashaK45 a while back.
