jasonc

Having been a follower of your content for many years, I remember the previous purge a number of years ago where it seemed like a similar situation was developing. I have always enjoyed the content and will certainly be sad to see it disappear... especially given how much of it isn't really catered for elsewhere on YouTube. As others have said, got to focus on the priorities though - if the channel is becoming that much of a liability, then binning it will be the right choice - as disappointing as that will be to all of us. All the best!

Thanks as always for the video, Tommy C for the DX and everyone involved with sourcing. I was curious about how this one played out, so I did a bit more digging... this Cheerful Pessimist video from 2017 has an interesting insight: Sure enough, that seems to be what is happening - and not only can you trigger the notorious critical error (HEY! Check it out!) but you can really screw up the profile of the machine - to your benefit or detriment. Cash or Bust (Death or Glory) in IM awards Mega Streak, for faster experimentation. On restart, there seems to be three scenarios: The restart was too late, and the win will be accounted for correctly and the IM happiness on 50p will end. The machine successfully recovered the win on restart (e.g. during count-up or reel spinning phases) - it'll be credited to the bank but wrongly accounted for against the 30p stake. As happened in the video - if you restart just after the count-up finishes on any win (e.g. during bookkeeping phase), the machine can "pop" (sound effect) on restart and does a memory clear - the win is voided (neither tracked or credited) and the existing bank and credits will also be lost. This means the machine has accounted for wins that it will never pay out. The meters do give an idea of the fuckery going on: CASHIN (physical cash) and VTP (total staked) drift apart due to the credits lost by memory clears. STK1 PERC (30p) and STK2 PERC (50p) track the awarded wins, but PERCENT (overall) behaves differently - e.g. 28.9% overall is lower than both 105.0% at 30p and 36.1% at 50p components. STK1 PERC can increase without STK1 VTP changing - e.g. 3351 at 64.1% becomes 3351 at 73.7% If you do get the critical error, you can still check the meters out of curiosity through the door - in my case STK1 3405 at 126.5% (+£131 drift) was fine, but 3405 at 136.5% (+£165 drift) killed it.

Which makes it similar to the clubber mentality - most of the time you're playing (e.g.) a £25-capped machine, but when it's ready it'll offer you a shot at a bigger prize from the secondary pot. I do wonder how AWPs would have fared if they went that way - e.g. plenty of gameplay with a £20 cap, with the occasional chance at £70 or £100. The players would have hated it (or would have had inside knowledge of how to rip them, and we'd be back to square one) but it would have given the casuals a bit more of a chance... who wants to put £10 or £20 into a fruit machine with no realistic prospect of being offered more than £2?

Thanks for the videos as always. I was thinking about the Compensated or Random thread, and one of the comments there was the distortion of stake to jackpot - a point mentioned here as a key part of the 2p era as well. It's a curious comparison to the £1/£100 era, because those machines despite the (slightly) better percentages are much more aggressive in the compensator. To the point nobody really plays the game itself - they force it for jackpot. I know the 5p/£6 era gets a bad reputation - and as someone who used to play them at the arcades on holiday, it was a double-edged sword. Machines that could be fully converted (where the minimum prize was 20p or 40p) allowed for a reasonable game, but those that couldn't (where the minimum reel win was £1, and most feature boards were itching to pay £2+) were going to be the equivalent of watching paint dry while you wait 50+ spins for a feature board that wouldn't kill you at the first opportunity.

One of the observations Degsy mentioned in the video was that the old ones hadn't been nerfed from 96% yet - and that's because they have to formally communicate that change to all players. We are very much a frog in the boiling pot at the moment: some operators are only launching new games at 93-94%, some are nerfing the back-catalogue as well (and sending out hideous emails trying to hide the evidence - the William Hill one was a shocker as the links were broken!), some are even going full speed and nerfing again from 94% to 91-92%. Casual players are definitely noticing autoplay has gone, whether they care enough to change their habits I don't know - but the UKGC trying to force it from a secondary or passive activity (as it is for many of us - watching YouTube on the side or similar) to an active one (because that's the only way to be responsible in their eyes) does seem to be a blunder, and we'll only see changes if it causes a massive reduction in play or an increase in dangerous behaviour (e.g. average stakes increase).

While I'd agree that the coding practices have moved on, the testing and verification processes still feel like they're lagging significantly. Thinking back to 2010 when Perfect Deal was released, fuzz testing had been a thing for a few years at that point (one part of which is to provide random inputs to the game, e.g. a really dumb application of autoplay in MFME). You would think they'd have been able to come up with a way to test the feature loop, and see if there was - by random brute force - any way to trap or trick the game and bypass the block. For sure, some bugs - such as the WoW mana build chop mentions in the video - you marvel at the ingenuity, and yet others you facepalm at the stupidity... As an example, I'm still astounded how last year's Street Fighter II (NetEnt) cock-ups got through internal testing, external auditing and verification to be certified for an online casino. Especially as it wasn't a new mistake either, The Dark Knight Rises (Microgaming) got there at least six years earlier...

Both of them came up in a conversation about music used in gameshows - so not too dissimilar to this thread! The first was a fluke - they sourced the Numberwang track, I listened to the rest of the samples out of curiosity and stumbled on it. The second I'd always had in my head that The Mob had used "that track from Fort Boyard" (because it's very distinctive, and The Mob was released a year later), but only heard about the library track recently.

I remember The Mob (MDM) had a bunch of obscure samples that I assumed were in-house productions, but recently (more than 20 years later!) came across the library albums: Simon Etchell's Game Show Showtime had the feature entry (track 82), meet the mob (track 83) and extra life (track 91); the same album would later give us Numberwang (track 09) Justin Myers and Neil Palmer's Xtreme Sports had the getaway car (track 08, about 53 seconds in), the full track had previously been used on Fort Boyard.