Review of the new MG games - Hitman (March 2007).

[Simmo!]

Oh no!! Yet more more bad reports of slow downloads and problems with MG Casinos, I am getting very concerned about the release of our MG casino. I am still waiting to hear back from MG regarding their download speed and problems!

They are aware of it and working on it apparently, Naomi

[Zoozie]

I see that many players getting 1-3xtotal bet during 18 free spins, wins are doubled. This makes me wonder whether Hitman is really a medium variance slot. Maybe it's rather medium/high variance?

It is a good question, it is a close call.

The bonus games win are very limited though the second bonus can pay a fair amount (few 100*bet-size).

18 freespin with *2 multiplier gives 36 which is a measure for how the freespins are in terms of 'base payout'. For Thunderstruck it is 15*3=45, but because of retriggers the value for Thunderstruck is 16.76*3=50.28 Also wild doubles wins for the thunderstruck paytable. And 4 or 5 rams has a VERY good paytable also. So I believe Thunderstruck is a high variance
while 'Hitman' is medium.

A good measure for variance is also how high the 'base payout' for a slot is. The higher this is, the lower variance. Of course the variance can be calculated exact with the slot analyzer program, but you would then have to know the reel.

The following equation is for 5-reel slots with freespin feature. Case1 is with retriggers allowed and case2 is with retriggers not allowed

Pr= payout% effective
Pb=payout% base (if no freespin feature)
n=number of freespins (retrigger allowed)
m=free spin multiplier.
f=chance of getting a feature ( 3 or more scatters normally)

Pr=Pb*(1+f*m*n(1/(1-nf)))

If retriggers are not allowed then this becomes the simpler form, as the average number of spins for
feature just is n:
Pr=Pb*(1+f*m*n)

Since we know that all MG slots has payout(Pr) around 95-96%, we actually know all variables except the base-payout and probability of getting a feature. However for most freespin slot this probability is close to 1/143 if they are as Thunderstruck with only 1 scatter on each reel.

When I determine the variance I mostly look at the number I just calculated which was 36 for for Hitman. I then look at the paytable which is a bit high
for Hitman, but there are no wild multipliers though. And the slot is missing the good 5 scatter wins also. But as I wrote in my review the 3 expanding wilds can give some very good wins and maybe I have underestimated this. So I could live with calling it medium/high variance, but I tend to go with medium only. Lets see soon how many good wins with 3 expanding wild will show up in the winning screenshot thread. For a slots with only 1 wild on each reel(Thunderstruck) it does not matter much for the variance if 5 wilds pays 1K or 10K since it is so rare.

Zoozie

[purplenaomi]

They are aware of it and working on it apparently, Naomi

Thanks Simmo, we have also been in discussion with them and have forwarded them all the threads reporting 'slow microgaming' etc.

[vinylweatherman]

Thanks Simmo, we have also been in discussion with them and have forwarded them all the threads reporting 'slow microgaming' etc.

The problem is that while they are "still working on it", they have extended the problems of All Slots and Royal Vegas to all the MG casinos this month. They should have aborted this till they had properly assessed all the data and problem reports, and to the point where they could say exactly what was going wrong, and what players could do with their PC to tune it to respond better for MG casinos.
My biggest problem is an exit corruption. While I can launch and play SOME of the affected casinos, they cause a fatal train of escalating errors on exit, which complely kills the OS in three moves.
The hallmark of this train of events is that the casino fails to reset the graphics display mode to what it was when it was launched. The routine that is supposed to do this produces an exception instead, and the desktop is returned in the casino's display mode rather than the user desktop mode. This means no "task bar"! It is possible to recover this by right clicking on the desktop and resetting the graphics mode. This returns the task bar, however many OS functions have become corrupt, and in particular the shut down function produces the BSOD instead of closing Windows and shutting down the PC. CTRL-ALT-DEL is also disabled, and the only option is to switch off using the power button. This also leads eventually to the corruption of the hard drive FAT, with it reporting far more space than is really available. I recently found that I had a mere 100 or so Mbytes left, despite "My Computer" showing some 12 Gigs of remaining free space.
This particular problem has not been mentioned by anyone else, however KK stated that the King Neptune upgrade crashed his laptop, and this upgrade included the new lobby that gives me all my troubles. It is likely the same problem, but because of its nature it will manifest differently on different PC configurations.