I have noticed unusually poor performance at MG recently, and it looks "wrong" hand by hand, and spin by spin. The big losing streaks are there, and they always have been, but the big WINNING streaks seem to have gone away. It is now one nice hit, and suddenly everything goes into deep freeze. It makes it look more and more like that what we are playing is merely a representation of a predetermined result, rather than a card by card or reel by reel random determination. Card games seem to come in two distinct moods, either loads of low cards, or loads of high cards. High cards favour the player in most, if not all, games, whereas mostly low cards favour the dealer, even though the player can get some wins too. With Blackjack, this is obvious, but I have seen the 3 card poker do this too. Endless hands that have to be folded, with only the occasional hand that can even be played (Q,6,3 and above). I also seem to be unable to make straights or flushes with these low cards, and often the dealer is getting many high cards, so even the playable hands are lost.
Video poker seems just as streaky, low cards means nothing is held, and everything has to be discarded. Low pairs, however frequent, are worth nothing unless matched with either another pair, or another card.
Slots, just don't seem to be "dealt" so many scatters for the bonus rounds, and this also means far fewer retriggers during the fewer bonus rounds. Despite being random, this theme seems to have been consistent for 4 months and counting, so looks like a change, rather than natural variation.
Now we have Mega Moolah - THAT was changed, and there is NO WAY MG can ever hide the fact, since the change was so obvious because of the huge impact it had on the two lower jackpots. Did MG come clean - hell NO!!! At first they pretended nothing had happened at all, and "would investigate" (come on MG, we were not born yesterday - this may work when explaining the bad run on other games, but I think you shot yourselves in the foot by trotting out the same scripted denial with Mega Moolah).
MG have to realise that the unadvertised, and even denied, change to Mega Moolah has undermined trust. Certainly one thing is now a FACT - MG CAN CHANGE EXISTING GAMES, something that was denied in the past. Although it doesn't mean they HAVE changed games in the past, it shows that given a business case, they WILL change an existing game, and then DENY IT!!! This lack of up front honesty makes other protestations of innocence less credible, and each time MG get caught red-handed over a deception, this credibility falls further still.
Other blows to MG credibilty have been unmasked:-
OLD video slots - they have been shown to be WEIGHTED, yet MG have never said anything about this, and only indicate that we get a similar experience as in Las Vegas. Well, if these slots WERE in Vegas, the operators would be in Jail, as weighted VIDEO slots are not permitted.
Video Poker double game. Shown to be predetermined, yet presented as a choice where the player can influence the outcome. Nothing of the kind, the player wins or loses before they even see the up-card - exposed by buggy MG software (serves you right).
MPV Tournaments - see above
3 Reel BONUS Slots (two in particular) - MG introduced software bug (but how
, these are VERY OLD GAMES, and surely DO NOT GET CHANGED
). The bug was, for once, in the PLAYER'S favour, and lead to a mass locking of accounts and confiscation of winnings. MG fixed this by pulling the games from the worst affected casinos immediately (I saw them, there one minute at Golden Tiger, then gone! - never to return - which is how I deduced what games were affected when the story broke).
Contrast this rapid action with the "rapid INACTION" over the bug with the MG bonus system where new cash becomes part bonus even after a player has ZEROED OUT (and should thus have WR removed). Perhaps the simple fact this bug favours the CASINO might explain the complete lack of urgency in finding a fix. This bug caused a recent issue, and the response of the rep was along the lines of "What bug?". How silly, the cover up was so good that even the casino's didn't know of it
The other softwares are just as bad, we can only base our trust on what we see and experience, and hear from others. There is NO real in depth independent analysis published, as it is all "commercially sensitive" - and consumers know that many companies use this catch-all as a reason to avoid fessing up to what consumers would regard as a "rip off".
Here in the UK, a couple of big companies even lied to the GOVERNMENT in order to fool the regulators into allowing "rip-off" price rises, and these companies are far more tightly regulated than casinos, yet still managed to get away with it for some while before they got caught because they were FORCED to reveal the information they were trying to keep hidden.
I am just waiting for the day when some heavyweight such as Panorama or Dispatches turns it's investigative resources onto the online casino industry, and this can't be far off now they can freely advertise here in the UK, making them of more "mainstream" interest.
Our "Channel 4" (or one of it's independent program producers) is widely believed to have been sniffing around the Fruit Machine industry, and making attempts to contact players "in the know" through some UK Fruit Machine forums, so my money is on "Dispatches" rather than "Panorama"