Gambling Commission questioning the legality SWP's

cp999 · Post by **cp999** » Sat Aug 08, 2009 12:58 pm

After I read the bit about compensation mechanisms, I experienced a rare twinge of sympathy for game developers. Not only have SWPs had compensation mechanisms since their inception, it should be glaringly obvious (even to the Gambling Commission) why this is the case. It does, however, say "compensation or control mechanism used in some types of machines" so perhaps it is not referring to the conventional SWPs which we know and (in some cases) love

grecian · Post by **grecian** » Sat Aug 08, 2009 6:36 pm

[quote="cp999"]After I read the bit about compensation mechanisms, I experienced a rare twinge of sympathy for game developers. Not only have SWPs had compensation mechanisms since their inception, it should be glaringly obvious (even to the Gambling Commission) why this is the case. It does, however, say "compensation or control mechanism used in some types of machines" so perhaps it is not referring to the conventional SWPs which we know and (in some cases) love ]

Yes, let's hope so. Surely the most the Gambling Commission can ask is that at any given compensation level, the game is true skill i.e. at any particular level of "payingness", a better player will consistently win more than a worse one? Maybe the sentence refers to compensation mechanisms which don't build up smoothly over time but instead chuck in a random paying game every so often in the middle of a series of non-paying games? That might begin to look more random.

dmac · Post by **dmac** » Sat Aug 08, 2009 7:42 pm

grecian · Post by **grecian** » Sat Aug 08, 2009 9:20 pm

dmac wrote: Isn't that how the Stackers allegedly work?

Exactly that thought crossed my mind playing Rocket Ronnie this morning. Lost a few games, then got an easy run up to about £4. Took a guess and lost, and it took another 4 games to get any sort of prize at all.

I'm not sure about Stackers, but from what I've played of it Rocket Money does have that sort of mechanism, I reckon.

Barry Trotter · Post by **Barry Trotter** » Sat Aug 08, 2009 10:44 pm

The gambling board are more concerned with games that compensate (i.e control) themselves in such a way that it becomes impossible to win, regardless of how good a player you may be.

Stackers fall fowl of this in a BIG way... I'm good at skill stops - i've had enough practice on Red Arrows and the like for Wild Thing style features, so i SHOULD realistically have been walking away with a playstation every 5 or so quid. Strangely, however, i can nearly ALWAYS get to the point where it does the dodgy roll off...

Therefore, the game is NOT skill - it doesn't reward skillful players. It is games like this which has given the SWP world a bad reputation - quite how its took this long for people to realise that Stacker isn't skill amazes me.

I hope the Gambling Commission use a bit of common sense. However, we all know how stupid the law can be at times..... If you want to remove ANY element of chance from a game, then how far do you go? Is the roll of a dice on the screen Chance - you don't have any control in the number...??

mr lugsy · Post by **mr lugsy** » Sat Aug 08, 2009 11:28 pm

lai games who manufacture stacker and giant stacker amongst others ,state in their manuals that accompany aforementioned games that there is an element of skill involved ,i've posted before about this game a couple of times ,iirc you can set the giant stacker to a maximum of 800 credits (either 800 pounds on £1 play or 400 pounds on good old 50p play) before it'll quit with the blatant blocking. you can also set the thing to go a bit faster so to appear less blatant with the skip on the last level but any player with a smidgen of hand eye can still see that they've been ripped even at a very brisk pace.also to put it on max speed has the detrimental effect (to cashboxes) of putting your average/piss poor player off repeat plays and afterall they are the target demographic for this machine.it is very difficult ,if not impossible to avoid the appearance of the blatant skipping as the machine only steps in large blocks as opposed to a smooth traversing of pixels.

the payout of large prizes on this game does'nt always run to plan for an operator though. sometimes the large prize will come alot earlier than expected and can even come soon after a previous large prize award.

as i understand it (and i may be mis-informed) there is always a very tiny window of opportunity that will allow you to win on this game, and i'm talking about a slice of a second in the range of maybe only one thousandth(this would explain the occasional anomally with regards to the set payout percentage).by my own reckonning if this is the case then you could class this game as skill ,but it is beyond any mere mortals capabilities to show any kind of long term profitability without insider knowledge of through-put vs payout unless you have studied ninjitsu since toddlership.

cp999 · Post by **cp999** » Sun Aug 09, 2009 12:01 am

Barry Trotter wrote:The gambling board are more concerned with games that compensate (i.e control) themselves in such a way that it becomes impossible to win, regardless of how good a player you may be.

It's all very well for them to be concerned with that issue, but the simple fact is that I could name games which very clearly are skill AND have the aforementioned compensation. And the reality is that if the gambling board got their way and those games were redesigned without the compensation, I (and I am sure others) would then spend the next n months touring the country near-emptying every single cabinet found with the relevant games. I've done it in the past and wouldn't hesitate to do it again, and I'm certainly not unique in that respect.

It's rare for me to take the side of game developers, but I genuinely think most stuff is reasonably fair, with a balance between playability and the necessary defence mechanisms. The gaming board don't appear to be living in the real world. Perhaps they should have seen what people did to Give us a Breaks.

Barry Trotter · Post by **Barry Trotter** » Sun Aug 09, 2009 12:29 am

I personally would like to see the end to games where you can get to the end game (i.e use a plethora of skill, or knowledge) and be awarded a poxy prize of less than the game cost me to play. This is daylight robbery! There should be a minimum prize that its POSSIBLE to get in every game if you are good enough - that doesn't mean it can't be nigh on impossible unless you're Suri... but a prize of, say, twice the cost of the game shouldn't be TOO expensive to have as a minimum prize surely!! DOND - Big Reds - 4p - cheers!! F**k off!!

Barry Trotter · Post by **Barry Trotter** » Sun Aug 09, 2009 12:30 am

Thinking about it - the gaming board should just run every game past Suri/Grecian/Nil Satis/anyone else on here who takes pride in beating games... If they can beat it - it must be legal ... AYSTATYO... WWTBAM... ETC.

Nil Satis · Post by **Nil Satis** » Mon Aug 10, 2009 12:02 pm

My two penn'orth:

I can see this going one of two ways, if the Gaming Commission does indeed decide there are non-skill games masquerading as SWP - one positive, one negative:

negative - all the "skill" games, which in my narrow little world includes everything except Q&A games and Word Up

, are banned - roulette, bingo, blackjack, Big Reds, Spot the Difference etc are all outlawed. Because these games are payers for the landlords and machine companies (otherwise why else produce so many of them?), this has a majorly negative effect on the whole industry and all the remaining Q&A and word games are made non-payers to all intents and purposes to try to recoup the lost earnings, meaning the game is indeed up for our wee hobby/profession

positive - the removal of all this dross means that the games companies have to return to what was originally their strength and produce lots of interesting games that give punters the odd quid or two to keep them happy while at the same time offering genuine rewards for those with the skill and dedication required to beat them. In the meantime, to fill the gap left by all the removed "skill" games, the games companies revive lots of old favourites from the storage box.

This last point is what I have found most depressing about this last year - I can understand the need to bring out new product every so often but the sheer volume of it is overwhelming and I know from watching punters that they too find the number of new games bewildering. Worse than that, they share MY annoyance when a favourite old game gets removed. The current versions of the three main cabinets - ItBox, Paragon, Gamesnet - is the poorest each has been for some time and this is at least as much about what is NOT there any more as what is. To see some of the utter dross that survives each new edition is mystifying.

dmac · Post by **dmac** » Mon Aug 10, 2009 6:25 pm

wires74 · Post by **wires74** » Mon Aug 10, 2009 6:26 pm

I must say nil that was very eloquently put

Barry Trotter · Post by **Barry Trotter** » Mon Aug 10, 2009 10:22 pm

Nil Satis wrote: lots of good points + .... To see some of the utter dross that survives each new edition is mystifying.

Surely its down to either how much money the game makes, or how many plays it gets, or a combination of both....

If Joe Bloggs is the only person in the country losing £10 a week in Every Loser Wins, then its going to get pulled quickly.

Nil Satis · Post by **Nil Satis** » Mon Aug 10, 2009 11:40 pm

wires74 wrote:I must say nil that was very eloquently put

Thanks!

dmac wrote:I like the current itbox/Gamesnet issues. Eliminator, Treasure Quest and Choose to Lose may be based on old games but they are new to me. JP and Robin Hood are quite good fun. Admittedly, around the time of Issue 15, I could justify travelling quite a distance whereas now I am fairly happy scraping together my beer money. But that's just the way it goes.

... and that in the end is the point. We play these things for different reasons and I almost always judge every game on one aspect above all - potential profitability (Word Up being the one exception I can think of off the top of my head, and even with that I am usually able to win a quid or two now). It's the same point that grecian made a few weeks ago with regards to Caesar's Palace and the description someone provided of how they played it - he said "we obviously play the game in very different ways" and I accept it's sometimes hard to remember that. My own amateurish efforts on Word Up or on the occasional dabble on a fruit machine while waiting for a quizzer to become free would no doubt be noticeable to one of the mavens in those areas as "playing the game differently" - I am still pleased just to clear on Word Up but have no intention of trying to learn how to take that step up into the world of the QUIZZICALITIES, and that's mainly because I don't see enough financial benefit.

I'm on something of a farewell tour at the moment - playing a lot and touring a lot (while still working), and always trying to leave a simply ginormous Word Up high score on a machine that hasn't yet been visited by one of the names on here (or even occasionally when it has been visited - a very unexpected sighting of HULL HULL on Saturday springs to mind). The problem is that the 4 or 5 games I play are all at least a year old and they are gradually disappearing, while at the same time not one game I've seen in the last 12 months has aroused anything other than fleeting interest.

My own guess is that the eventual outcome of the Gaming Commission deliberations will be, as ever with these things, somewhere in the middle - some of the more blatant examples of non-skill games will be stopped but the other ones will survive, albeit in modified form in some cases. What I don't foresee is any sudden increase in decent new Q&A games, and while beer money will still be available for plenty of you, I'll have to find something else to keep me out of mischief. If only football hadn't also gone to the dogs...

Nil Satis · Post by **Nil Satis** » Mon Aug 10, 2009 11:48 pm

Barry Trotter wrote:
Nil Satis wrote: lots of good points + .... To see some of the utter dross that survives each new edition is mystifying.
Surely its down to either how much money the game makes, or how many plays it gets, or a combination of both....

If Joe Bloggs is the only person in the country losing £10 a week in Every Loser Wins, then its going to get pulled quickly.

I just find it amazing that to quote say from the current Paragon release, things like Treasure Island or Snakes And Ladders Gold, or Cluedo Reloaded or Battleships on the ItBox, are retained at the expense of say WWTBAM. I can fully understand games being pulled if they are losing the pubs and games companies a lot of money, especially via the succession of bugs we witnessed earlier in the year, but would ANYONE (punter or player) have missed Treasure Island as opposed to WWTBAM? The answer might be Yes - after all there are still some people out there watching Big Brother so there really is no accounting for taste! - but I reserve the right to get all grumpy about it when it happens...