It’s been about seven months since the online casinos launched in Connecticut. I gave them a good go at the very beginning, and more recently I’ve given them a second round of in-depth review.
While there’s plenty of things to like about them, there’s also a number of things to dislike, and perhaps most surprisingly those things are still around and not resolved. So in today’s post I wanted to cover about what I’m less than happy about, in particular things I think they can ultimately fix if they work on things.
Meters for Bonus Offers
Both DraftKings and Fan Duel are very unhelpful in letting you track against various bonuses. Fan Duel has bonuses that often escalate the prize based on the amount of wagers you make, but give you nothing to actually track those wagers other than the full accounting log of every wager you make. You then have to count the number of spins you did and do the math yourself.
Some DraftKings offers, like missions and leaderboards, will let you see how you’re progressing. Deposit bonuses now have a page as well. But other offers don’t, and so you’re sometimes on your own as well.
You’re On Your Own
There’s a lot of things that simply aren’t clearly explained, even though I don’t take it as being done in a specifically nefarious way. Here are some examples of things that aren’t really all that clear:
- Fan Duel lets you link your Momentum account to earn comp dollars, but there’s nothing to indicate how often they’re deposited, for instance. I earned $3 once, but haven’t seen anything outside of that. I have no idea if I earn in real time and some dollars are pending, if it takes a LOT of play (which even in my limited experience, it does seem to take a lot) to earn comp dollars, etc.
- DraftKings has both DK Dollars and Free Credits, which work different. DK Dollars act like cash and are played first when you’re gambling, while Free Credits have to be activated and played on their own. And then there’s the comp dollars, Crowns, which have a conversion rate and can be converted to either bucket. You have to sort of work your way through all this to understand how each work and how to take advantage of them.
- The DK Dollars on DraftKings and the Bonus on Fan Duel appear as part of your overall balance and you have to look at the detail to see there’s bonus funds vs. cash vs. both. As such, you have to pay attention when they put that money there because you may not realize a bonus has hit, and playing with bonus funds doesn’t count towards your various promotions. So if you’re trying to play to a certain amount of coin-in it can mess things up if you don’t realize bonus funds were in play.
These are just a few examples, but there’s a lot like this.
Limited Game Libraries
In other states the sites have much larger libraries than they do here. While I get they want to keep engagement going by adding games on a steady basis, there’s just a ton of games that aren’t available, and most of the games they’re adding are by online-only companies that have titles that aren’t familiar.
Don’t get me wrong – I don’t necessarily want to always play the games that I find in my home casino, but the lack of games from companies like Aristocrat and Ainsworth, and the limited amount of content from Light and Wonder, mean the game libraries tilt very heavy in the direction of IGT and Everi, as well as online-centric providers. And when it comes to IGT and Everi, there’s a lot of obvious omissions from their game libraries that I’d love to see added to.
When it comes to the games offered, there’s a long way to go before the sites will feel relatively complete.
Constant Tech Issues
This is a bit more on the DraftKings side in my experience than Fan Duel, but the little tech issues are constant and can get in the way of enjoying playing. DraftKings constantly logs me out or asks me to verify my location; FanDuel doesn’t.
My VIP offers for DraftKings used to show up on my dashboard; now it doesn’t and it sometimes is hard to know if I actually successfully opted in to my VIP offers. The amount of frustration I’ve gone through things the last couple of weeks alone has been irritating, just to get access to an offer I’ve been given.
FanDuel kept popping up messages at one point saying I had to activate two-factor authentication or else I’d be locked out of my account. But I already had it activated, and apparently they were sending the message to everyone, regardless of if they had it activated or not.
Given these are both tech companies that operate in multiple states, it’s quite remarkable that these issues are happening with such sort of frequency. I power through things sometimes because ultimately I’m compiling experiences to write about, but I can’t imagine others are as forgiving or patient, so this is just going to cost them revenue.
Subpar Support
My interactions with the various support teams of both companies have a lot to be desired as well. There’s regularly misunderstandings, I had one rep send me a templated email that had nothing to do with my issue, only to apologize and send me another templated email that was related to my issue but ignored the actual problem at hand.
The worst part was in one case I was emailing VIP support, and every single email I got was answered by a different person. I’m not sure how an issue is supposed to get resolved when every single response I’m starting from scratch with a different person. There needs to be a bit of ownership, even if it slows support down a bit, or you just go around in circles. It certainly has left a bad taste in my mouth.
Honestly, if I haven’t had a couple of rounds of exceptionally lucky sessions, I’m not sure I’d be giving these sites as much time as I have so far.
But so it goes – how have your experiences been? I’d love to hear from you in the comments if you’ve tried them!
