Thanks for helping make my point Chopley.
You see, I didn't state anything about things being "altered" or "worse", or any other general comments about the payout rates. I just stated that my experience was different to yours, so your statement about payouts being worse across the board are obviously erroneous. I wasn't presenting my good run as "evidence" of anything other than your experience is not the same as others.
It's called presenting another side of the argument, based on my experience. If it is OK for you to do that, why is it not OK for me? You, and some others, don't like what I say a lot of the time because I don't buy into conspriracy theories and don't proclaim that the casinos are up to something purely based on the fact I am not winning.
Find me some threads where someone said "Geez I am having a horrible run. My luck is definitely out!" and I "jumped on their head". Happy hunting! You will, however, find plenty where someone has said "The casinos have reduced their RTPs because I can't hit a damn thing and the games just aren't the same". Unless someone keeps a full spreadsheet of every single bet over several years with every detail included, nobody will have any credibility when they cry "rigged" etc. You see, if a casino tells me their games are 95% RTP permanently and cannot be changed, as MGS does, and they DO somehow change the RTP to 90%, then they ARE rigging the games i.e. they are cheating by deliberately misinforming me. Show me the spreadsheet/proof/communique/emails/etc and I'll be the first to start a public campaign to take them down. I'm still waiting.
You may see my response as "aggressive", but it is in fact logical and sound. If all you were saying is that your "experience is that I am losing more than before", then I don't have an issue and at various times in my own "career" I would agree with you. It is the next step that I take issue with, as nearly all of the members who have "gone troppo" (as I call it) have either been banned or laughed out of the place because they actually become convinced that their losses are not their fault, but rather an industry-wide conspiracy to rip them off at every turn. It is their perogative to do so of course, but I feel it is my duty as a senior member to state the realities of gambling and ask reasonable, logical questions and challenge their POV's, so that any newbw reading can reach and informed view of what the facts really are. Plus, it's kinda fun to see them go off their heads when they cannot have a civilised debate and make fools of themselves. FTR, I don't place you in that category chopley, and I hope I never do, as thus far you have conducted your debates like an adult, and kudos to you for that. I can't help thinking though, that you seem to think you have a very good "handle" on me for someone that has only been posting for a month or so.......
Fair enough I understand the point you're making nifty, but I have made a genuine effort to steer clear of any kind of 'gone troppo' posts or declarations along the lines of 'This has been fiddled' or 'This is cheating' or 'They've changed things', instead I have been careful to talk about how I feel about my experiences and what conclusions I've drawn from them, subjective opinion if you will, not declarations of fact.
(With the exception of noting where things definitely have changed, such as the Mega Moolah example.)
I appreciate I am a new poster here at the CM forums but I have been reading both the main site and the forums for years, it's only recently that I've decided to take part. (And since I have become an active poster here I've read back through an
awful lot of CM forums history.)
I do feel there's a difference between someone crying 'rigged!' (which I've not done) and someone saying that they feel the nature of play across a software range has changed (as I have with regards to MG slots) and are thus making the personal decision to take a break from playing those games. One does not need to present hard facts or data when it comes to expressing an opinion or a feeling, as long as they are not attempting to present that opinion as empirical fact, which I am not and have not.
Anecdotes are not data, of course, but to reach the personal conclusion that I did with regards to MG, I was referring to many hundreds of thousands of spins across many games, games which in most cases I had played extensively over the last few years. Following on from that, I had a look through the history here at CM and found I most certainly wasn't alone in getting this 'feeling', and whilst a great many of the posts were indeed of the 'gone troppo' variety or were made by people who flat out didn't understand the fundamentals of random numbers and variance and the weird things between them that they're capable of - after having sifted those out there was enough left for me to reach a
personal conclusion that I was no longer happy to play at MG casinos, as indeed others had done.
(It was during this CM forums hunt that I discovered the definite change made to Mega Moolah, and another poster had noticed that the paytable had changed on Franken Cash and Boogie Monsters after an update, for example. I won't present my own list here but I am personally convinced that some slots at MG casinos have been tweaked/adjusted in various ways, not necessarily RTP in all cases but also 'streaky' behaviour.)
None of this means that MG slots can't still pay out at 95% overall, but since MG are a completely closed shop and refuse to release individual RTPs for their slots, (or indeed for categories of slots, it's just '95% for everything', they don't even make any attempt to explain how the progressives work and what the impact is on the RTP of the base games), don't list variances, don't have a changelog, don't give any indication when or if a game has been changed (even when it definitely has been such as with the Mega Moolah behaviour), have 'AWP' style slots on their books which vinylweatherman claims to be able to beat despite them just being another collection of random slots according to MG, release regular huge updates to their software which are changing 'something' but no one really knows what.... I ultimately reserve the right to say 'I'm not happy about this'.
At the end of the day I'm taking the advice that yourself and max have regularly dispensed over the years, if a player is not happy about how a casino is playing for him, he should stop playing there.
That said however, I don't think it's unreasonable for me to share my thoughts and experiences with other CM members, and they are of course free to agree/disagree/ridicule as they see fit
