taking the skill out of SWP!

[ob]

Has anyone noticed that new quiz machines all show the same pattern - PISS easy questions till getting close-ish to the money ( or if ready till you get to £1/2 ! ) then really fucking hard ones no-one knows when it wants to block a certain amount of money...

Is this not comparable to a simple AWP! In essence a really good SWP player may get the same win on a game as a crappy one, surely for you great players of SWP, it must be annoying that idiots are winning £1/2 for answering really piss questions, and then killing it for another £5!

Oh well, at least it makes them more fun for us crappy SWP players

[Nil Satis]

Sadly most modern games are exactly as you describe, and personally I end up ignoring them, something I expect most regular players do. A game like Monopoly Deluxe may be beautifully designed and great to look at but it's so unlikely that you'll ever win even £3 that it should only ever be played for leisure/recreation rather than any hope of a decent win.

Some games have blatantly different question sets which are employed when needed to prevent you winning. Classic examples of this around at them moment are Deal or No Deal (Which four star film was released latest between 1938 and 1945?) and Trivial Pursuit (How many years were there between Book X and Book Y?). Weakest Link, a sadly rare beast nowadays, would switch into the second question set as soon as you had banked the target points on Rounds 2-4. All three of these however do sometimes offer a decent prize so I still play them.

My "favourite" Millionaire 2006 will sometimes throw an impossible question at you as early as 500 points - well, IS there anyone out there who knows every character who ever appeared in the Beano, the Dandy, Beezer and Topper?? Ironically I finally got my first JP on this one at the weekend, when for some reason it gave me 15 decent questions and no spoilers - the previous time I got to the £20 question is was something like "Which of these four words is the Malayan for windy?" - I can't believe I got that one wrong...

I've no problem with things getting progressively harder as long as you do sometimes have a realistic chance of a decent prize. The only response we have as players is to ignore the dross that doesn't offer that.

[ob]

"progressively harder" yes... but what most do is this...

First 7 questions ( PISS EASY NO ONE GETS THEM WRONG! ),

ok so now your at a point where the next 4ish questions if correct will merit £1... if it doesnt want to give £1.. MEGA HARD! If it does... MEGA EASY - there's no real inbetween on alot of machines!

So regardless of how good you are, you get what it wanted to give, so it really doesnt matter whether your good or bad at questions in the first place!!! Even an idiot could win £1 if it wanted to give it usually!

Although I do admit the analysis is very simplified, and many games are not at all like this, but most current SWP's are drifting more and more towards this, rather than skillful play allowing wins. - AND BY ALLOWING BAD PLAYERS TO WIN, THE GOOD PLAYERS WILL SUFFER AS THE MACHINES WILL BE DEAD!

[Ernest W. Quality]

It is just a matter of making it as easy as possible for the machine to make its % quota of prize payouts. By going from extremely easy to spoilers, if means that unless you simply learn all the spoilers, you have the same chance as everyone else of winning.

[ob]

indeed so, and in doing so, they've made the game a pointless gamble with a payout of 30-50% - this makes for a dull game - i.e. spot the difference - amusing game, but if it doesnt want you to get that quid, watch that timer go down in about 3 seconds flat - making it impossible to win even if you were brilliant...

surely this disheartens people into not playing again - I know it did for me!

maybe older machines did do this to an extent - but at least they didnt make it so damn obvious as the ones these days do!

A final point; I dont think its fair that on some games it is impossible to win on occasion - ie. celebrity get me out of here - 28 pairs to find is actually impossible even if you found one every go by fluke - there's loads of other examples of this - people will stop playing SWPs gradually once they realise this is the case!

[QuizMaster]

The analysis is a bit over simplified here. Punters do need to win sometimes as well and they do on certain games, (Hangman, Millionaires, Spot the Difference etc)

They even win on DOND when there's not one of us in the area, since the points target gets so low they can win.

I spend a lot of time watching punters (occupational hazard, since when I'm on the road I generally can't afford to skip to the next site)

On occasion, I have watched some players continually fail to get the most basic of questions right (you would describe them as piss easy). Trust me, there are people out there who do not know who George Best was, have never heard of the Chemical Brothers, and think that Simon Cowell has won the Nobel Prize for physics. On the road, I have actually won these muppets £3 or £4 in in a deal to get them off the machine so I can play.

I can play a bit, but their jaws hit the floor after I get through the first 2 rounds on Pub Quiz without using my try again. 'How can anybody be that good?' they ask me (after answering 10 questions on Pub Quiz).

What is piss easy to to regular players is not so to occasional punters.

[leonardo1]

I had a chat with 2 seemingly intelligent arts grads the other day who thought the Somme was a war between England and Scotland. I think most people my age (30) or older would be genuinely shocked at just how ignorant some of our young people are...add drink & drugs to the mix and this is why it is often possible to pick up 4 quid from Bully or a fiver from Pub Quiz

[Barry Trotter]

Just out of interest, how would you control an SWP so that it hit its percentage, played fair, and gave everyone who was good enough some money....

Surely a combination of those three is impossible - if it wasn't, wouldn't someone have done it by now....

Shame it isn't, i guess

[grecian]

Lots of good points here - this is the way machines are going.

A £1 win is relatively easy regardless of your skill level, but anything over that is rare and wins of over £3 become really unusual. I was playing a classic example t'other day - Brainteaser on a non-updated ItBox. Got to the endgame, and once there you get a £1 on your second word i.e. anyone who managed to get to the endgame (which isn't *that* difficult) would get the quid unless they were a complete muppet). But I then needed to get fully about 15 further words before £2 came up - which I managed as I had about c. 90 seconds in the endgame. The £2, then, becomes a real challenge and anything more a complete impossibility. Plenty of other examples - I know Nil Satis has mentioned Bullseye before - the £1 is really easy to get, £2 is quite possible but anything more is very rare, and in all my goes on it I've only once got the £5 bull. Ant & Dec - great game and £1/£2 is quite do-able; I've had £3 occasionally and maybe even a £4 once but never anything beyond that.

Trouble is there's a direct trade off between likelihood of getting a prize (any prize) and likelihood of getting a big prize if the payout rate remains fixed. If a 50% payout machine give out 5 £1 prizes every ten games rather than 1 £1 prize every ten games, someone loses out on a £4 prize. 'Professional' players such as us want a lower chance of small prizes and higher chances of the big pay-outs; they're why we've invested a lot of time and energy in developing our skills and knowledge. But inevitably manufacturers want a machine that will appeal to Joe Public and Joe Public understandably likes, and returns to, a machine where he thinks he's got a reasonable chance of recouping his stake. Therefore manufacturers will tend to produce machines like this.

Two points I'd make:

a. even given the above, some machines do get it right. Nil Satis referred to the excellent but now sadly rare Weakest Link, which seemed to offer good shots at £1 or £2 to Joe Public but also managed to give out fairly frequent £10 or £20 prizes to skilled players. The old version of WWTBAM was also good in this regard (less convinced on the new WWTBAM but it's none the less good fun).

b. conversely there are some games that seem to succeed on neither base. For some unfathomable reason I found myself playing Goldenballs the other day - has anyone ever won anything on this? The points totals seem so low compared to the targets, and it starts asking unreasonable questions so early, that I think even £1 would be really difficult. Or am I missing something? If not, it's probably the worst game I've ever seen.

[Weyland]

There's maximum game duration to think of as well. If it decided it's going to make things tricky for you, IE that it doesn't want you to win, then it'll want you out as soon as possible. They're not going to give you 10 minutes for 50p when they can get you to give them £2.50 for five 2-minute games. That could be why some games chuck spoilers at you right away.

[Nil Satis]

Two points I'd make:

a. even given the above, some machines do get it right. Nil Satis referred to the excellent but now sadly rare Weakest Link, which seemed to offer good shots at £1 or £2 to Joe Public but also managed to give out fairly frequent £10 or £20 prizes to skilled players. The old version of WWTBAM was also good in this regard (less convinced on the new WWTBAM but it's none the less good fun).

b. conversely there are some games that seem to succeed on neither base. For some unfathomable reason I found myself playing Goldenballs the other day - has anyone ever won anything on this? The points totals seem so low compared to the targets, and it starts asking unreasonable questions so early, that I think even £1 would be really difficult. Or am I missing something? If not, it's probably the worst game I've ever seen.

The features you mention re Weakest Link and WWTBAM are exactly what I miss. With Weakest Link as you say an ordinary punter could hit say a 5,000 target for £1 over maybe two or three rounds by gradually banking small amounts, but this method would never have been enough to win much more, apart from maybe on the 1,500 points setting. Good players, on the other hand, who could answer more questions and (crucially on this game) more quickly as well would have a chance of getting within the range of the £10/£20 prizes. Similarly Millionaire, unless it had just been Jackpotted, would always offer punters a reasonable chance of winning £1 to £3 but the gradual progression in question difficulty made the higher prizes out of reach for them.

For me there is a distinction between gradual progression in difficulty and a sudden jump into spoiler questions. An example would be:

EASY - Which football team plays at Old Trafford?
HARDER - At which cricket ground would you find the Warwick Road End?
SPOILER - In which year was Old Trafford opened? (with the four years being one apart from each other - if they are spread out at least you get the chance to use some intelligent guesswork)

As for Goldenballs I've sometimes found it offering £3 or £4 relatively easily with 20,000 being the points needed for £20 but just as commonly it will ask for twice as many points per prize and have 50,000 as the target and (worse) will also allocate prizes to only two or three of the 'slots' at the bottom of the screen. Yet another game to consign to the mental dustbin marked 'Don't Play'. My vote however for a shocker which I've tried recently is the Paragon Snakes and Ladders game, where you have to collect a certain number of bananas. Sheesh, I thought the Gamesnet one was bad but THAT one...!!

[ZAX]

re: longest game for minimal reward. Whats the longest youve played for a quid reward? In my experience Stand and Deliver was pretty good. once Id had a few quid it would then chuck the quid up to 500 and it was 25 points a go all the way ie twenty rounds to get the quid, which cos Id played it so much, was gettable a lot of the time. In effect I was getting about 20-25 minutes gameplay a go, which was a nice change from eg Buzzle and the like where it can be game over in about a minute..

Cops and Robbers is another one I reckon, though not played it that much, but last time I did it went on and on and on until I just gave up and took the quid. That is one mad game. Can it be JPotted?! How many hours do you have to go for that?!!

[Nil Satis]

There are lots of games out there like this - you are right in picking out Cops and Robbers and Stand and Deliver, but Monopoly Deluxe and Hex Appeal are a couple of others that spring to mind. The game I have played the most however over the years with £1 as the usual prize would have to be original Cluedo.

Deal or No Deal is a special case in that it can take at least 50 questions to qualify and that sometimes wins you ... 10p.

However as someone who mainly plays for money and not recreation, I hate games like this - I'd much rather have games that last 2-3 minutes where £10/£20 is realistically available (did I hear anyone say 'Millionaire'?) than games where it takes 20 minutes to make 50p - after all you could get four or five times that hourly rate in McDonalds!

[leonardo1]

a. even given the above, some machines do get it right. Nil Satis referred to the excellent but now sadly rare Weakest Link, which seemed to offer good shots at £1 or £2 to Joe Public but also managed to give out fairly frequent £10 or £20 prizes to skilled players. The old version of WWTBAM was also good in this regard (less convinced on the new WWTBAM but it's none the less good fun).

Don't see how that can be achieved in any game given the 30% or whatever pay out.

[grecian]

a. even given the above, some machines do get it right. Nil Satis referred to the excellent but now sadly rare Weakest Link, which seemed to offer good shots at £1 or £2 to Joe Public but also managed to give out fairly frequent £10 or £20 prizes to skilled players. The old version of WWTBAM was also good in this regard (less convinced on the new WWTBAM but it's none the less good fun).

Don't see how that can be achieved in any game given the 30% or whatever pay out.

I'm not sure either but in my experience TWL and WWTBAM have both managed it. Could mean one of two things:

(a) pay-outs were higher then - this is possible as I'm sure that back in 1997 or so when I started playing machines, pay-outs were roughly at 70% (69% rings a bell - someone correct me if I'm wrong) - although I appreciate TWL has only been phased out in the last two years or so, and old WWTBAM is still to be found in many places; or

(b) TWL and WWTBAM were so popular that they took really large amounts from Joe Public even when not paying out, and this money was used to offer both £1 and £2 shots as well as occasional jackpots and bigger prizes (a more likely scenario I think).