Unreliability of Gamesnets

[Nil Satis]

Following on from the discussion of Paragons v It Boxes v Gamesnets, my favourite machines for a long time have been the large oval Gamesnets, based solely on their contents and the amount I can realistically win on them. Recently however I have found them to be ridiculously unreliable when paying out, worse than any other machine I have ever seen.

The problem only seemed to start occuring when the first version of the software with the red background appeared (as compared to the earlier grey background that you can still find in places) but it has definitely got worse with the more recent editions, i.e. around the time of £1 Deal or No Deal and Caveman Capers arriving.

What happens on roughly one in three occasions is that after paying out some part of your winnings the machine displays a 'Red Screen of Death' with all the game options having disappeared and only the amount you are owed, the time and the date displayed. As we know it isn't always easy to get this money off the pubs and if this was just happening once or twice I would shrug my shoulders but it can't be just one-off issues with particular pubs/machines, given how frequently it happens.

Is anyone else experiencing this on such a frequent basis or have I somehow turned into Captain Disaster??

[BJ2006]

Is this the 'hopper unable to pay' message?

Gamesnets are my bread and butter and I've noticed a number of them displaying this message over the last 8 weeks or so, I had been wondering if someone had been going round emptying them.

What is strange is that I have not been affected by this, I have played around 20 different Gamesnets in the last week collecting between £7 and £19 each time but have not had any problems collecting the money.

[Nil Satis]

That's the message but I am pretty sure that it's a misleading message in some if not all cases - I've personally put more £1 coins into a machine than it has then been "able" to pay out on quite a few occasions (although I accept they do have separate internal containers for different purposes).

Like you I have also seen machines displaying the Red Screen of Death on entering the pub but given my experiences with them I don't then assume that someone has 'emptied' the machine in the accepted sense, just that the same mechanical and/or software fault has occurred to the unfortunate soul before me - sometimes the underpayment is as low as £1 or £2, which always gives rise to the temptation to switch the thing back on and take the chance...

One piece of information that might be useful, which the screen does give you, is how long it takes the particular pub to sort out any problems - I've seen the Red Screen of Death with dates of up to a week before being displayed, which doesn't give you much confidence in those pubs' willingness to fix faults and hence to repay any money owed!

As I said, if this was a rare occurrence then I would shrug it off but as an example it happened on three machines out of five last time I was up in Preston and 60% is just a ridiculously poor unreliability rate.

[QuizMaster]

You're not Captain Disaster. This is an epidemic at the moment.

[Istenem]

captain black and captian disaster in the same thread, what are the odds?

anyway, i've noticed that the iou screens tend to appear (in my experience) after the machine has just paid out the correct amount of money . over the space of three visits, both the red gamesnets in the same pub did this to me after modest (£4ish) wins collected.

is it a bug, genuine hopper problem or something altogether more sinister?

[Nil Satis]

Oddly enough, something similar happened to me on an ItBox last night. I tried to collect £11 of credit and it paid me only £9. This is pretty standard unfortunately so I thought nothing of it but I noticed on the way back out of the pub that there was an error message displayed on the screen saying something like 'Hopper Unable to Pay. Amount Owed £11.00'. It was after last orders and I didn't want to push my luck but it does show you how unreliable this new-fangled electronic witchcraft can be...

[Nil Satis]

I still haven't worked out why this is happening but what does seem to help is if you collect your winnings slowly, i.e. £2 at a time, waiting for each amount to be removed from the Bank before pressing Collect again. This replicates the behaviour of the old versions of the Gamesnets with the grey background, where you were only allowed to collect £2 at a time and consequently collecting any substantial winnings would be extremely laborious, but if it means you get more or all of the money you are entitled to each time, it has to be worth it.

P.S. One thing to be careful of if you do find an old style Gamesnet is that there is a bug which means the screen freezes if you press two of the category buttons, e.g. 'Quiz Games' and 'Skill Games', concurrently. There doesn't seem any way out of this short of switching the machine off and on again, the advisability of which varies from pub to pub!

[Mattb]

Pandemic more than epidemic i reckon!

Had a quizzer IOU this week, and one not pay me out at all. Its a conspiracy...

[BJ2006]

I still haven't worked out why this is happening but what does seem to help is if you collect your winnings slowly, i.e. £2 at a time, waiting for each amount to be removed from the Bank before pressing Collect again. This replicates the behaviour of the old versions of the Gamesnets with the grey background, where you were only allowed to collect £2 at a time and consequently collecting any substantial winnings would be extremely laborious, but if it means you get more or all of the money you are entitled to each time, it has to be worth it.

I think this may be it, I always wait for the £2 to come out before collecting the next £2 to ensure they don't bunch up in the tubes should one get stuck. As I mentioned above, I play a lot of gamesnets but have never had the red screen of death.

[Nil Satis]

I think this may be it, I always wait for the £2 to come out before collecting the next £2 to ensure they don't bunch up in the tubes should one get stuck. As I mentioned above, I play a lot of gamesnets but have never had the red screen of death.

This 'slow collection' method does help but doesn't guarantee you don't get the Red Screen of Death - this happened to me yesterday when trying to collect just £6. I was as gentle and careful as possible and the first £2 came out OK but then the red screen popped up, displaying that I was still owed £6, just to prove how unreliable these things are! Talking of which, I've encountered a major bug on Millionaire 2006 which I'll post separately.

[grecian]

I came up against the infamous red screen of death myself yesterday. To my great delight I found a GamesNet in a pub well off the beaten track, went into play it, and promptly won £20 on old style BM. I got six quid out before the red screen of death appeared. To his immense credit, the landlord paid the difference out of the till and said he'd get it back from the machine company - a very pleasant surprise when most pubs nowadays will just give you an IOU. Still very irritating though.

[BJ2006]

I saw a new background the other day, it was a blue/grey colour with what looked like a burst drum design on the left hand side and a circular design on the right.

The tabbed menu structure and 'play with me' messages were exactly the same as the red package though. Hopefully the bug has been fixed with this new version.

[Nil Satis]

This seems to be a similar one to the bug on Millionaire 2006 - it looks like it MAY have been fixed on the new version with the blue background, but again the original advice is still sensible, namely in this case to only collect £2 at a time and then wait for each coin to drop before collecting the next two. It may be slower but it's worth it if it means you get all the winnings that are rightfully yours!