I feel a bit sorry for Choppers now. That reveal about the lowered RTP% on Double Fancy 7's seemed to crush his gentle spirit a bit. I hope he's OK
Seriously though, if we didn't have online slots we'd all have to play land-based slots at 86-92% in AGCs or LBOs, surrounded by mouth-breathers peering over your shoulder as they wait to put a 50p accumulator on, their body odour so toxic it's like you're eating it.
And look at the variety you get on those terminals; Eye of Horus and Fishing Frenzy everywhere you look. Boring as fuck. At least online you get plenty of choice, low stake options and the RTPs are still decent in comparison. We've been spoiled for years.
Cheer up pal - 95% isn't the end of the world
The thing for me is there are other activities I like to do in my spare time, not anything particularly noble or interesting, but I love playing videogames (I've got basically all the consoles and a high-spec gaming PC), or watching something on the telly, or even just reading a book.
The limiting factor for me, honestly, is not money but time. As an adult bloke with a full time job and family and friends and whatnot, I only have so much spare time, so I like to do something with that spare time that I find enjoyable and presents the minimum of friction.
I like a gamble, I like a punt, but there is a threshold it can cross into being disagreeable or a pain in the arse where I will just stop doing it, and say, 'You know what, fuck it, I'll play a videogame instead'. (Or something else.)
Online slots are starting on a sticky wicket in that you're not 'buying' anything in the traditional sense, there is no product that you own once you've handed over the cash, you're paying for the excitement of having a gamble via what are (hopefully.....) well made games with high production values that are able to engage you as a player, you know, like the ones Microgaming used to make. Of course you can win some money along the way, which is the other big selling point, but when there's a permanent house edge of ~5%, one doesn't need to be a mathematical genius to work out where that one will ultimately end up - so in my books, online casinos have to be 'selling' something pretty good to justify that.
In the last few weeks I've started playing Warcraft Rumble on my tablet, it's a fun little game where you put together a cute army of 'minis' and go up against either AI opponents in campaign style missions, or other human beings in PvP matches. There's a lot of pay to win in there with the game throwing up obvious barriers that spending some money will get you through, and to date I've spent a modest chunk of cash on it, but honestly, at least I feel like I'm
getting something for my money, even if it is only a digital collection of (endearing!) little digital units that don't even remotely exist outside the game. (And which will most likely get turned off at some point.)
Compare and contrast with VS, who despite taking money off me over many years (and looking at my lifetime account stats, they've had a solid chunk of cash off me), have seen fit to pull the rug from under me on a nice little one-liner
that was making money for them, just not enough money, apparently - so they decided to stick the better part of another 70% onto their house edge, and not tell me about it when I loaded the game in.
Against that backdrop, and the increasingly player-hostile landscape of online slots in general (some of it regulatory, but an awful lot of it from the 'industry' itself), I find myself over that threshold where I just don't want to do it any more, I don't feel it's a worthy recipient of either my time, or my money.
There is an element of 'straw that broke the camel's back here', obviously, Double Fancy 7s getting nerfed hasn't immediately and violently made me throw my toys out of the pram whilst wailing 'NOT FAIR NOT FAIR NOT FAIR'. As many members here at CM will personally attest to, the world of online slots and online casinos today is very different (in a bad way!) to what it was ten years ago.
Even places where the casino and the games are totally solid, such as 3Dice, what with the crypto faff (and expense), or trying to sign up for something like Mifinity which fucked up on the registration process and left me in a weird sort of limbo where I can't get access to my account without emailing a support address, has now left me thinking 'I'm not sure I can be bothered with this any more', I've got pretty slick at buying and transferring crypto now, but it's still a lot of hoops to jump through, with multiple authenticators and verification steps just to get a deposit into a casino, and using Revolut because HSBC decided they didn't like crypto and either stopped my card working (debit card) or told me off for 'withdrawing cash' (credit card). The latter showed up as a negative indicator on my otherwise spotless credit report, hence the move to Revolut.
It's not the end of the world, and in many regards it was fun whilst it lasted, but as with many things in life, there is a point at which the correct decision is to walk away, and do something else.
