jasonc

Yup, whatever you want to call them (the TikTok generation, the Twitch generation etc), the shithole casinos realised they could amplify the tricks of their predecessors, throw money at "celebrities" that are either too ignorant to challenge, or willing to be complicit in, some shady, illegal and/or predatory behaviour. Sure enough, five years later and it's an absolute dumpster fire of people being preyed upon and ripped off left right and centre. So either it's gambling on some shithole unregulated casino, or gambling on a video game... the outcome is inevitably the same - they have the money, you don't.

As a point of clarification, SWPs are not regulated as gambling machines - despite often being made by the same manufacturers and in some cases almost indistinguishable from them. Things like the 30% RTP and £50 cap were guidelines here - because there was no formal regulations. The justification for the "cap" was the larger the jackpot, the more difficult it would be to justify as a skill based machine - because it couldn't be "skill + chance" (even though there were ways around that). That's not to say skill machines were fair - there was all kinds of shady crap going on... cue @Chopaholic with his Crystal Maze SWP videos and the grabbing hand mechanic. Absolutely agree - the ticket converted AWPs are disgraceful and everybody should run a mile. Given how "low effort" conversions are - drop the decimal point from wins (because £1.00 = 100 tickets), add a (one-time effort) module to handle tickets instead of coins, cut the RTP from 76-86% to 30-40% and call it job done. I wouldn't be surprised in the slightest if the same tricks worked on these as well (because it'll be 90% of the same code), so not only is the casual punter fighting a heinous 65% house edge, but players may be able to extract that value first on top... so those punters are doing the gambling equivalent of setting their money on fire. ... that's also assuming the operator values the tickets fairly at the other end, otherwise they'll be scalping that RTP again on the way out. So 35% quickly becomes 30%... 25%... 20%...

Oops... thanks for the correction. I had that in the back of my mind because Log Flume was £3 + repeat chance (and those features rarely got "upgraded" because it required artwork changes) and then still got it wrong So yea, if you can, play it on 20p / £6. Some upgrades will be better than others, but rarely does the gameplay improve because the compensator is having to do more work to get back to percentage - and some machines are notoriously worse where the jackpot gets so large the compensation model falls over entirely. That's true, as Mikey mentioned I am referring specifically to the text message shown on the alpha display during a mystery square (although it wasn't unique to Roller Coaster - as Indiana Jones and others of that generation also used that terminology). As you say, it's funny how rapidly "skill" disappeared from the lexicon when it had to be true skill...

As a rule of thumb, always play it on its "default" stake and prize combination - JPM Roller Coaster is late enough in the day that I expect £8 tokens and £10 cash handle pretty similarly. The primary criticism I have of it - is the use of the phrase "skill stop bonus" on a mystery square - there's no skill involved, and it can (and will) kill you. I would agree that it's as close as anybody got to having a well-designed AWP that offers a game to casuals and opportunities to experienced players.

A lot of it comes down to evolution, some of it comes from unintended bugs being left in as "features" - which becomes self-fulfilling with the amount of code reuse across machines of a given manufacturer. So the very earliest machines won't recognise three holds (three consecutive holds awards the win), but almost every machine after the £4.80 era will. Some machines are susceptible to "swap holds" where the same three hold rules apply but not with the same hold (which allows a player to guarantee a different win, e.g. feature entry) For number trails: "three in a row" (a number on all three reels) will often award feature entry; some machines will similarly guarantee the feature if you get multiple trail held spins in a row above a certain threshold. There will sometimes be opportunities to slow things down - which may be the cancel button or a branded logo button. Particularly handy for skill stops or pseudo-random mystery squares (which become true skill because you can pick what you want). You will spot patterns as you play - and some of those will be intended behaviour of the machine, but as @MikeyMonstersays get any notion of random out of your head. The compensator controls the game - sometimes with an iron fist - and that will determine what it is willing to offer. The discrepancy comes when a machine doesn't "see" danger (e.g. a low-valued step to nearest win, combined with nudges, where the nearest win is now jackpot) and a skilled player can "rip" value from the machine - if they can do this often enough, it becomes a full-blown emptier. If you "get behind percentage" (not just lose money, but lose enough to fall behind the target percentage - e.g. 76-80%) then the "happier" the compensator will become - in some cases to the point it'll spin in a jackpot without player intervention. I still shake my head that "true skill" became a recognised term because manufacturers were known for fiddling "skill stops".

As a shot to nothing, it may also be worth trying the older drivers if you haven't - quite a few communities are recommending the 566.36 (December 2024) release as a temporary workaround for 40-series and earlier cards, because the 50-series drivers (bless them, they've only had seven eight attempts at it so far...) have been causing a whole raft of problems, including blue screens. I had to roll back because it was causing issues with my 1070 - so it's not just the newest cards that are impacted.

Probably worth having a look at the Party Time thread: The Astra profile was quite different in that the compensator was given some flexibility (e.g. semi-random). So even at maximum happiness it could have periods of being a pig, and at minimum happiness it could have happy periods. Hence the ridiculously large hoppers to allow for those swings...

There's quite a strong element of "don't need to" as well, the legacy standards (covering up to 50p/£25) explicitly mention 10,000 game rounds to get to stated target percentage. So a streak of £125 is only 2.5% over the next £5000 of wagering - but that assumes you can trust the compensator (and by the £25 era, I think pretty much every manufacturer had lost control) which is why they'd all "block like a bastard" (technical term). Which brings us to Big Wheel - even when it was catastrophically behind percentage (because you don't force a JPM), it would - surprisingly quickly - give that value back when played vaguely normally. If it knows it has a jackpot or two in the tank, it can take the guard rails off - just in this case it happened to be the case for a hundred jackpots rather than two. It's entirely academic beyond £100, £150, £200 behind because you would need everyone to be playing it badly in the same way for it to be realistic. Andy Capp I remember the discussion for - and it feels much more nefarious because it had been the strategy of choice for the players of the day. So they know an uninformed player would be good for £100, £150, £200, £250 of coins and be more than happy to give them the bad news by not going over the top. Indeed, given the design of the machine, it was actually impossible for the machine to make percentage because it couldn't force wins - so the battle would continue until the drift overflowed (e.g. 65536 x 10p if I recall correctly) the compensator calculation and crashed.

Congrats on getting to 1k subscribers (yet again)! I believe the first one had even more than that when it closed? I remember watching both you and BL4K and had a lot of respect for the informative commentary and straight talking in what was a vipers nest of corruption... and that was many years before twats and hats became the norm. It's understandably a niche, I would also add with so much gambling content being generated out there now-a-days (particularly from the fake money streamers), it becomes more and more difficult for genuine organic content to surface. Naturally the YouTube algorithm can't distinguish the difference, so it gets confused when I'm watching various gambling content but then I block most of its recommendations (from fake streamers)

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.