I think stake is experiencing unexpected growth and that's mainly since they aggressively promoted in the Indian market. I remember previously 13-15k users were online at a time but now there are over 100k users online almost all the time. Because of such growth the live support response time has also gone up significantly. I noticed they also stopped the email support totally.

So it makes sense they are now making VIP requirements harder to get a host because each host is already overwhelmed. I believe on some stream Eddie said they have over 100 hosts now which is quite insane!