Less short answer - I had an epiphany, in a grotty Wetherspoon's pub in unlovely Guildford of all places.
2010 was a pretty poor year for me in lots of ways and I ended up playing A LOT of quizzers, both for essential finance and as a distraction from life.
Then one night last autumn in said grotty Spoon's I saw for the first time the first post-HMRC Paragon and I knew that the time for serious quiz machine players was up; to paraphrase Churchill, it may not have been the end right there but it was certainly the beginning of the end. GWHL had been the only company even
trying to release anything worthwhile for the last year or two and to see their response to the new rules was all I needed - the response being the non-pay skill-based games, the removal of several decent games and the butchering of most of what was left. This from the clear market leader, both in terms of the number of machines around and (as I said) the quality of innovation.
The HMRC rules were certainly a factor in where we are now but I don't think they are the whole answer. Games Media, for example, didn't need the 'excuse' of the new rules to turn their Ind:es into complete turds, as that had already happened some time beforehand, and the rules clearly don't exclude such options as the Next Game Bonus, as some people on here thought at the time, so the spineless offerings we are now provided with can't be blamed exclusively on the guidelines.
What GWHL seemed to have done is made a strategic decision to move away from the old model of a high throughput enabling some reasonable payouts to one where much less is taken and next to nothing is paid out. How else to explain the plethora of non-paying games, that Foxy Ladies bingo fiasco and the desperate quality of their only two recent Q&A games - Eggheads and the already-binned None of the Above?
Their recent release has taken things a stage further and confirmed everything I thought back in the autumn - even the few remaining Q&A games of any quality have been updated in a really clumsy and heavy-handed way - adding enormous numbers of impossible questions just because they include the word '2010' isn't going to encourage punters to start playing again.
Luckily life for me has improved a little since 2010 and I don't
need the machines as much in either of the senses I mentioned. I am still an enthusiast and still hope to find games that make giving up precious leisure time worthwhile, but I no longer waste any time hoping for good stuff.
Which leads to the original question (about Caesar's Palace 2). In case anyone is still unclear, someone realised there was a very simple bug in the gameplay that meant it really wasn't hard to empty any machine that contained the game. Ironically I had actually been amazed at CP2 - not because I'd worked out the bug (I missed that boat sadly) but because I didn't think anyone would dare release an 'old style' game any more, where skill, perseverance and a bit of balls actually meant you could win a decent amount.
I may try to post on here again, now that I have woken from my hibernation, but I feel like I am the tail end of a 25 year affair - it's been fun while it lasted, with lots of ups and downs on the way, but it gets harder and harder to remember how things ought to be.
I leave you (for now) with my favourite SWP question and answer of 2011:
Q. What does "Nil Satis Nisi Optimum" stand for?
A. "To err is human, to whinge is divine."
Signed,
The Divine NS