Fruit Machine Chat

my only suggestion involves monopoly- how about having 4 cards on community charge and chance like old cleudo where an outcome can be influenced by a players skill including a skill stop of varying lengths depending upon how happy the machine is. Also a suspended card so that it is possible to remove the duff sites from the endgame such as Old Kent Road which would appear face up in grey with 'sale suspended' to guarantee a generally small but higher prize.

'Mortgaged' surely? Don't think I've ever come across 'Sale Suspended' in a game of Monopoly.

shows how much I play it. I stand corrected.

One simple improvement for Monopoly - stop the end game giving you the lowest of the three prizes in 90%+ of cases.

Otherwise it will remain just a game for punters, lured in by the familiarity of the game and the pretty pictures, to waste their time and money on, while people who know what they are doing ignore it.

..

Ha ha. I realised as I was writing the previous post that it contained within itself the explanation of why I think Monopoly is so rubbish but then I thought:

(a) this is a forum for those with a developed interest for SWP machines, combined in some cases with an increased ability over the ordinary punter to win on them

and

(b) the aim of this particular thread was to ask such an audience what they would like to see in the way of improvements in particular games, of which Monopoly was the first example chosen.

The key point though is that not all games are like this, i.e. offering no realistic prospect of a decent win. There have always been games which offer good players the chance of a decent win while at the same time still making money for the machine companies and pubs via the throughput from punters. However too many games nowadays have gone too far the other way, offering no one (good players or punters) a decent stab at a win, at whatever level they consider attractive - many punters being absolutely delighted with a £2 or £3 win. Many of these get the treatment they deserve and soon disappear from sight when both groups of players realise they have nothing to offer (Toss The Monkey for example).

Good games on the other hand can stay around for years by appealing to both groups of players - the original Millionare being a good example - and that is the challenge to games designers. That is also the reason why I reserve the right to come on here and complain when I don't see any potential in a game.

Next post - why I don't like Bullseye because it doesn't give me the £10 prize every time...

Totally agree with Nils Satis- the purpose of the machine companies isnt to thwart the pro- its to make games that appeal and have longetivity. There is no point having a game that the pro cannot win on, and yet doesnt appeal to the general public. A game only gets removed if there are either multiple jackpots or somebody can through patience take lots of small wins that makes the machine non-profitable. As our threads are monitored I thought it would be good to put forward ideas to improve games not neccessarily making them more jackpotable. As we are constantly playing them we are in a better position than most of the programmers to see what can be done.I believe they do take our points on board, perhaps I am naive.
ps well played ns portsmouth m2

I suspect Monopoly would be improved by most of the endgame cards being nothing with a larger number of decent prizes. That might mean that although prizes per se would get rarer, they would be of a better size when actually awarded. I would have thought that would appeal to professional and punter alike.

i dont play quizzers any more ,but used to play millionaire quite alot ,even managed 40 quid on it twice .
in my mind it was the best one because it was very obvious as to when it was going to profitable(with the free game as low as 500pts for a nice little profit or anything up to 8000 for a few quid back)
i'm not exactly sure if most quizzers tend to give a lot of the same old joey questions when they are ready cause i have never really got involved with any other games,but i suspect that millionaire was probably the easiest to get a return out for the average punter.
what i did notice with this one was the fact that it got constant traffic and that would reduce the waiting time for you experts out there to make more (this must have been one of the best hits of all time for you guys if the likes of moi could milk money from it.)
anyway,with the popularity of wwtbam i'm surprised that the same format was not rinsed to the same degree that the dond awps continue to be(if it actually was then apologise sincerely for my ineptitude)
i know the question sets were updated ,but it did continue to be popular with joe bloggs and was still good for a profit unless the free game was up to 32000 and the game breakers were chucked at you from about 500pts .

xyz

Stand alone Millionaire machines are a fond memory, this where mr lugsy achieved his 40 quids.
DOND on terminal is a different animal, but I salute Mr L, you can only achieve success where and when it is available!

mr lugsy wrote:i suspect that millionaire was probably the easiest to get a return out for the average punter.
what i did notice with this one was the fact that it got constant traffic and that would reduce the waiting time for you experts out there to make more

Absolutely right on both points - the original Millionaire (standalone and when transferred to the multigame cabinets) was very popular with punters as unless someone had just won the Jackpot they had a realistic chance of what to them is a decent win - £2 to £4 is all most punters want. The fact that they might put £5 to £10 through to get that win won't bother most of them, such is the sense of achievement of the win. Similarly the very high throughput meant that the payout cycle was much shorter so you didn't have to wait too long for a machine in a busy location to be ready to pay again.

mr lugsy wrote:anyway,with the popularity of wwtbam i'm surprised that the same format was not rinsed to the same degree that the dond awps continue to be

The Millionaire format has actually been recycled quite a lot although the various formats may have looked quite similar, as compared to the DOND AWPs, each of which is (as I understand it) a completely different game. Off the top of my head there have been the following variants:

- the basic 50p/£20 standalone
- a similar £1/£40 standalone
- a 1 player/2 player standalone where the JPs started at £20 for each game and went up by 3p/6p per 50p/£1 credit
- a rare 'unlimited' JP standalone - I only saw this one in Bar Med in Reading and won a few JPs in the £80-£100 range
- an arcade version with three machines linked together and a shared national JP of several hundred quid
- the original 50p/£20 game transferred to various multigame cabinets
- a complete revision called Millionare 2006 which stank to high heaven and which can still be found on some ItBoxes
- a complete revision to produce the 2008 Celebrity version with a new end game that involves ranking four celebrities by their ages

dmac wrote:NS: I know you say this happened in the past, but it doesn't appear to be mathematically possible to create a sequence of 100 games (say) which gives out several JPs to the top players and decent small prizes for talented hackers, while at the same time sticking to a 30-40% payout.

I would never have claimed several JPs were possible in a 100 game sequence but it was easily possible that over a 200 game cycle the original 50p Millionaire could have paid out one £20 and a few £2-£4 prizes for the £100 taken in. Two points that are worth making here - (1) games were often much shorter, meaning throughput was quicker - even average players can make the current Monopoly game last 5 minutes and (2) standalones meant the spare money wasn't diluted across lots of different games.

The challenge remains then to create games in the multigame environment that appeal to everyone and that get enough throughput to ensure their longevity - Deal or No Deal being the best recent example.

xyz

dmac wrote:

Nil Satis wrote:

dmac wrote:NS: I know you say this happened in the past, but it doesn't appear to be mathematically possible to create a sequence of 100 games (say) which gives out several JPs to the top players and decent small prizes for talented hackers, while at the same time sticking to a 30-40% payout.

I would never have claimed several JPs were possible in a 100 game sequence but it was easily possible that over a 200 game cycle the original 50p Millionaire could have paid out one £20 and a few £2-£4 prizes for the £100 taken in. Two points that are worth making here - (1) games were often much shorter, meaning throughput was quicker - even average players can make the current Monopoly game last 5 minutes and (2) standalones meant the spare money wasn't diluted across lots of different games.

Say a machine is set to a generous 40% pay out - i.e. £40 payout over 200 games. That would be one JP and say 3 £4s and 4 £2s. 8 prizes from 200 games?

I don't know if that's really how they used to play, but that wouldn't impress me much and it wouldn't be long before "mug punter" was back on the bandits.

You would be surprised how many consecutive losing games punters would manage (especially as often they wouldn't get the lifelines). Quite common to see them gettting close to the £1, or winning it and then losing it trying to guess the £2 question. Also, if a jackpot was won, nobody would be winning anything for quite a while till the points came down from 64k (to say nothing of the fact that you would have to answer quite a few more than 11 questions to get to 64k..).
*remembers such events as "Your next question is for 15,250 points"!* when at 64k

Was thinking about this over lunch and planned to make the point that several others have made in the interim - that the gameplay on the likes of e.g. the old standalone WWTBAM was of sufficiently high quality that your average punter would be quite happy to put maybe £10 (or even more) in for a return of perhaps £2 or £3 - and indeed, might even have thought of that as a bit of a triumph. As NS says, the speed of games was pretty high on something like WWTBAM. Therefore there was often a good bit of cash floating round to pay out in bigger prizes and JPs to the likes of us.

Of course, one big advantage that WWTBAM (and the old Weakest Link standalone, to which I think all the same points apply) share with DOND (which NS posits as perhaps their nearest modern equivalent) is the draw (for average punters) of being connected with a very high-profile and well-watched TV show - that gets a wide range of punters playing the game in the first instance (who keep playing it if the gameplay is good).

And the final point, which again isn't original and has been made on here before, is that back in those days there were less competing SWP attractions for punters to spend their money on - nowadays every second pub has a machine, and every machine has a minimum of about 15 different games. Of course the money is going to be spread more thinly, just like you'd never get 30 million people watching the same episode of Eastenders any more.