It's so easy to change a slot's payout odds that I think it's a lot more important to know the real RTP the house has been paying, than the theoretical one listed by the software maker, unless you can compare both the pay table
and the reel weights with the factory settings. And players don't usually get access to reel weights. Add one more stop for a lemon on one reel of a fruit machine and you can change the RTP drastically.
My software has one progressive slot that's 100% RTP (theoretical and real), with daily payout percentages listed... but the deal with this slot is that it only pays 100% or more if you play with skill.
I have a theory of game design I've been working on for awhile, and the new games I write follow the same pattern, which is like this...
1. Make a game that anyone can play without any skill at all, but with a skill element that they can choose to play or not.
2. Design the game so the pay table is the same whether they play for skill or not,
3. Make sure that pure "luck" play without any skill pays a pretty good RTP - say about 96% - and that the more skill they have, the higher it goes, but, not much more than 100%.
4. Make jackpots pay out more frequently for skill play, and make it progressive.
In theory, I think this should work. You end up with a game that pays out in reality around 98%, because a lot of people don't bother with the skill options. Jackpots are still open to everybody, but the higher-skilled players tend to take more of them.
In practice, it hasn't been exactly a smooth ride... the slot I mentioned, scuba cube (
Link Removed ( Old/Invalid) ) was designed just like this. But I made a mistake in the math that wasn't discovered until a very skilled player showed up and won 5 jackpots over two days last week. After the third jackpot, he wrote and said, I think this game's broken... but we just kept paying him out and didn't believe him until the 5th one, and then I was like... okay, this game's broken, I'm pulling it offline. Turns out I mixed up a variable and the thing was paying out somewhere around 600% for the most skilled players (the luck-only players who contributed to his progressive pots had no idea, or they would've played the skill option!) On the up side, the math isn't broken now, but still over 100% theoretical if a player is very skilled like he was. In the end, 100% was boring for him after winning so much while it was broken, and he hasn't been back much since the fix. So I guess it all comes down to what your expectations are...
The point i'm making - somewhat long windedly - is that many of the counter measures put in place by the gambling industry to stop people winning have not been properly thought through and often these anti-player procedures end up hurting the casino more than helping them.
This is also a really good point. I'm struggling with a kind of awkward situation at the moment. I get 1-2 tables of poker filled a night, pretty much exclusively freerolls, but it was starting to bleed out a little bit into real games. We try to be a friendly place, so we had a lot of family groups playing, some from the same IP addresses, which was considered OK as long as their opponents knew about it. But it started to become a problem when some of the new players who were showing up complained that it wasn't right to let a few groups sit there and generally run the tables.
So I got harsh and I put in a new policy where same IP players - and even ones who've shared IPs in the last day with each other - can't sit at the same table. We immediately lost half our poker audience and the other half (the ones who complained) had no one to play. I realize this is a kind of extreme/stupid example, but it says a lot about how it's more expensive to micro-manage security on some things than it is to just let a few people slip under the radar.