With the Revolution Gaming Network now nearing its one-week anniversary the rivalry between Lock Poker’s old home, the Merge Gaming Network, and their new home, the network they purchased and rebranded Revolution Gaming, has heated up, with both networks making big announces and changes in the past 24-hours.

A couple of days ago I talked about the promotions and rakeback offers each network is offering, as well as some upcoming software upgrades that are in the works. Well, today it was the Merge Gaming Network who unveiled their new software, while the Revolution Gaming Network announced they would now be paying rakeback to their players every hour.

Merge Software Upgrade

The Merge Gaming Network unveiled their much-awaited software upgrade on Tuesday, but unfortunately in this very competitive time the software was roundly given a bad score by players on the network. In addition to the usual complaints about the look and feel of new software, there were numerous bugs reported.

Part of the problem with the software may have been due to Lock Poker being the main contributor to the network’s software upgrade prior to leaving Merge. Left with an almost completed software upgrade (and now a new rival in the US market) Merge may have hurried the finished product out before it was ready.

Lock Poker will be unrolling their own version of basically the same software in the coming days/weeks (there is no official timetable set for this release) and if they can win the software war with Merge, the Revolution Gaming Network could suddenly put some space between the two.

You can read some of the complaints about the new software at Merge HERE.

Revolution Gaming Switches to Hourly Rakeback Payments

On the same day that Merge rolled-out their less-than-well received software Revolution Gaming made an announcement of their own, albeit on a much smaller and less impactful scale. Revolution Gaming will now be making rakeback payments every hour instead of daily.

While this may not mean much to the serious grinders on the network, for casual players this could in fact be somewhat of a selling point, as rakeback money will appear virtually instantly into their poker accounts.

Traffic

Traffic at the two networks has remained fairly deadlocked since Revolution Launched on May 31st. Since the software upgrade at Merge, Revolution Gaming traffic has skyrocketed, and at the time of writing Revolution traffic was nearly double that of Merge according to PokerScout.com –although this could very well be a product of the site being down for a few hours in order to upgrade the software.

***EDIT*** The massive drop in traffic was due to the Merge Network going offline in an attempt to fix some of the software glitches.

We are just two more days away from having a complete look at the Revolution Gaming Network’s traffic numbers weekly numbers, and as it stands it looks like Merge and Revolution will be on almost equal footing in terms of traffic.

Tags: Anniversary, Bugs, Contributor, Couple Of Days, Finished Product, Gaming Network, Ins, Look And Feel, New Software, Online Poker, Promotions, Rivalry, Score, Software Revolution, Software Upgrade, Software Upgrades, Software War, Switches, Timetable, War Gaming

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 6th, 2012 at 7:41 am and is filed under Poker News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.