Back on topic ever so slightly, a clear distinction must be made between the tweaks that have been carried out on the two games.
The Hells Bells tweak - to make the £20 prize require around 70-80 correct answers (I've seen targets of over 13,000 points) - is both expected and acceptable (as long as the game does not say give a set of deliberately wrong answers after a certain point). This is the behaviour that has been built into every SWP game that has ever been put out onto the market, i.e. providing a game with the ability to become harder and/or less lucrative if too many prizes are won by players.
One side issue worth making is that the tweak hasn't in many cases made the lower prizes proportionately more difficult. On this one I've always treated the £6 prize as the
de facto Jackpot anyway, given how much harder it gets after that. Obviously you won't find many ItBoxes left with the early prizes down around 1,000 points but if you were good enough to take the lower prizes before the tweak then that really shouldn't have changed.
What ISN'T acceptable is the Take It Or Leave It tweak of always giving you no lives and then the double Booby Prize. Instead of making the game harder to win on they have in fact made it IMPOSSIBLE to win on. This must surely be illegal, although proving it might be tricky unless you could get a copy of the internal e-mails authorising the change to be made
.
The only response is to not waste any more money on the game and hope it disappears in the next release. It's a real shame as this was easily one of the best games of the last 5 years, if a little slow and ponderous.
To show that it's not all doom and gloom, has anyone else detected a tweak
towards player-friendliness on the Millionaire game, or have I just been lucky enough to find a few machines in a row where, as Properpro might say, a lot of money has gone in for that particular game and not much has come out? What IS for certain is that it has started popping up on the Gamesnets with a 50p stake, but with the rest of the game seemingly untouched, which does make it a more enticing prospect and also indicates the software company involved have realised the £1 a go version was putting ordinary punters off and have had a rethink.
matter are the fools who lose. they were not playing TIOLI, that was aimed squarely at you chaps. it didn't hit %age so it was dropped.
). Nowadays people are I think a lot more aware of the fact that machines will screw you if they want to, and consequently I think the response is often one of resigned acceptance rather than outrage.