Fruit Machine Chat

About 6 months ago, me and the mrs were bowling in Edinburgh's Fountainpark.

There was a multi game terminal in the bar which Im sure had DOND on it. But it also had something that was like Take it or Leave it. All the questions were true or false but if you took away the £20 box you got to open all the other boxes without answering any questions.

It was kind of a nice touch in that if you took it away then at least the spoilers werent going to get you anymore.

Anyway that was the only place I saw it and ive never seen it since.

It was Take it Or Leave It.

Apparently, everybody chose to Leave It, hence its disappearance.

Id forgotten how dreadful TIOLI was, and had one game on it yesterday- Mentalist T or F spoilers kicked in after about question 4, and so I took the offer, which was 10p.

What could I have won?


20p.


nuff said

I quite enjoyed it!

Probably only because I onlyplayed it once and won though.

And I remember we got lucky with about 10 spoilers.

ROSSKEEN wrote:I quite enjoyed it!

Probably only because I onlyplayed it once and won though.

And I remember we got lucky with about 10 spoilers.

In a wazzed up moment me and a mate had another go at this -probably cos we're masochists. Answered all 19 questions- hacked through to the bitter end. The prize

35p

Timely reminder that..but it did make me wonder out loud- has ANYBODY EVER TOOK ANY MONEY OFF THIS F@CKIN GAME! Well more than 35p anyway....

In my stupidity I played this again yesterday, having already mined the other games on the unit and having quarter of a pint left to drink. I eliminated the £20 box which switches the game onto 'no questions' mode.

I kept being given offers like 10p, 15p which was absolutely no reflection on the average value of the remaining boxes (and, crucially, loss-making), so of course I rejected such offers.

In the end, having got no questions wrong, what was in my box?

5 fucking p.

This game, since renamed 'Believe It Or Not', is a disgrace.

You could win the £20 jackpot! Choose not to believe it.

The prize 35p

How can it really even be called a prize when it's less than your stake? Grr...

This really is (was) a shabby attempt at ripping of DOND.

Slate (sh)it or Aggrieve (yourself) it...

Did once manage to win on this game

50p in

.
.
.
.
.
.


70p prize

I can only guess some doltish manufacturer thought it would be a good idea to have a machine that paid out its expected 30 per cent (or whatever) every game rather than saving up the prizes and paying something every few games, without realising how incredibly tedious this is. For my money games just shouldn't have prizes lower than £1.

Grecian: Worryingly, you're probably right. It's either a very cunning (but ultimately flawed) tactic to get people playing as they 'win' most goes, but actually can never make a profit. Or, the programmers are somewhat lacking in ability to implement a sensible payout 'plan'.

This reminds me of the new Blockbusters game. Some weeks ago I managed to complete the game three times. My prize each time? "FREE GAME". This means I was guaranteed a loss as soon as my 50p went in as no fool is going to keep on playing in the hope of a free game.

I agree with Grecian that a £1 minimum prize is sensible and fair. If anyone could be bothered to bring a quiz machine case to court then I think a few worthy precedents could be set with regard to quiz machine conduct. Some games which could find themselves illegal include Believe It Or Not (5p prize for a 50p stake??), New Blockbusters, Bullseye (you're not allowed to hit the £5), Triple Towers, and any game involving the rolling of "dice" like TP2 and Monopoly.

Fruit machine players know well that the machine is not random. In contrast to this quiz machinists are given to believe that the dice roll in a quiz game IS random, but experience does not bear this out.

anybody who believes that a die roll is random on an swp is a muppet!
everything about learning an swp database is about maximising skill and minimising chance. An element of chance and control in a game is a neccessary evil to prevents people like the dreaded B word from flourishing.

I don't think that q-time is saying that he's shocked to find out that dice rolls are not random, only that they should be. Although you could argue that a dice roll has nothing to do with (S)kill WPs, so shouldn't be included in any game - not going to happen.

Some people take the literate meaning of the term SWP a bit too much sometimes I think (me included, as stated above!) The skill part to the majority of SWP titles now, is in answering the question correctly, not the 'dressed up board game' that decides which category of question you will be asked and for how many points.

cool wrote:anybody who believes that a die roll is random on an swp is a muppet!

If you recall the Hagar the Horrible AWP, the hi-lo gamble involved an encapsulated physical dice spinning around, and they even fixed that !

I think I would be far more willing to play fruit machines if there was a truly random mechanism at work, perhaps some sort of wheel which the user can spin and which comes to a natural stop. Instead we get this illusion of randomness - yet it is the machine which both starts and stops the spinning process.

It would be easy to program a truly random dice roll on a quiz game but no one would believe its randomness as it would only be represented as pixels on a screen. Shame, because it would make games like Cluedo and Monopoly more exciting.

QT