No, I don't think so. The full sentence was:
i.e. I think he means the person designing the slot at RTG failed to notice he put the same symbol at the start & end of the reel strip.
I can imagine that's quite an easy mistake to make!
As I said before, to me it is
extremely likely that this is on the LOWEST payout version, since we know they lower the RTP by adding symbols.
Therefore, players can tell which casinos have a higher return setting by looking for Fruit Frenzy without the side-by-side Pears... at least, until they make the inevitable update...
Disclaimer: I'm guessing & could be wrong. Also, we know different slots can have different RTP's within the same casino.
KK
There IS a way to check, and that is to compare this reel with that found in a casino who has publically declared it uses the mid range 95%, and has never "tweaked" the games downwards.
The second way is to analyze this variant, and calculate the RTP. WE now know it is the variant with repeated pears on stop 40 and 1, which appear together. It is a case of getting the strips for all 5 reels on this variant, and having a go at working out the RTP.
It is not easy, but if we have a variant known to be the 95% one, we can use information from this to work out how much RTP comes from the bonus game, and how much from the base game.
It is highly disappointing that players are FORBIDDEN TO KNOW the RTP of the machine they are playing when this is coupled with the fact that casinos can "tweak" this RTP WITHOUT BREATHING A WORD to customers. The only reason this got noticed was because of the double pear.
This has never been highlighted before, yet was a "human error" in the DESIGN stage. I can speculate that this is the first time casinos have used these variants, and we are seeing the first proof that it is a whole lot easier to have slots changed to a new RTP variant than we were lead to believe in earlier replies from operators etc.
Given the economic climate, it is likely that the change has been from the 95% "standard" version to the approx 93% lower RTP variant. This ties in with loads of posts from players convinced that they just don't seem to get the "playtime" for their money from RTG slots that they used to.
There is no absolute proof, but do we, as players, need this. RTG casinos refuse for the most part to disclose the RTP of their games, we know this RTP can be changed, and now we have evidence that it HAS been changed at casinos where we see Fruit Frenzy displaying this double pear on stop 40/01. I doubt casinos would go to all this trouble to change the RTP on just this one slot, given how we have been told it takes 6 months, and has to be requested, and agreed, through RTG - I believe it fair to assume that any casino that has done this has requested changes to a package of slots, and without evidence to the contrary, I would assume the changes to be to a lower RTP.
We, as players, should bear this in mind when depositing, and assessing the value of a bonus (20x WR is a far worse deal if the RTP has been lowered).
MGS casinos in general refuse to disclose the RTP of the games, and those that DO publish only give a range, such as 95% - 96%. What we DO know though, is that once released, the RTP never changes again, and if MGS casinos want to put the squeeze on us, they have to do it OPENLY, perhaps by increasing the WR on bonuses, banning certain games, or offering less "free" money altogether.
A few years ago saw the dissection of many MGS slots, and extraction of their RTP. This task could at least be done ONCE per slot, and gave answers that were appropriate for all MGS casinos. With RTG, we have to look at THREE variants for each slot, and calculate the RTP three times.
There are some RTG slots simple enough to calculate exact mathematical RTP values for using the "slot simulator". This might catch out those casinos likely to be using a lower RTP than the "standard", and players can judge for themselves whether these casinos have lowered the RTP on more complicated slots too.
As in the case of the double pear, various RTP variants might carry such "markers" that make them easy to tell apart, so it should not be necessary to completely gather the reelstrips from each RTP casino to tell which RTP variant is being used.