- Joined
- Mar 25, 2012
- Location
- IOM
I had to laugh at the second video, as it reminded me of an old Bastardcrest £150 jp I used to own. I tried hundreds and hundreds of pounds trying to force it past the 'bar' 4 features down from the top on 88% setting and it soon became apparent that as long as I had a hole in my arse it would never do it, it was simply impossible to achieve on that combo of dip switches/RTP. It got so stupid that to compensate it dropped the £150 triple-red-bars 4OAK jackpot in a couple of times when holding just one or two of them so the RTP could catch up. So I came to the same conclusion as you - that after getting the machine so far behind % the best policy was to play features to and gamble cash to just below the barred level.
On every RTP setting there were differences - I recall on one that the Cashpot 3 symbols would ALWAYS drop in between 80.00 and 81.00 after a really stupid deliberate spin, and afterwards you would be able to gamble the cash up to £50 for 'afters'. Then fuck-off. All in all, my conclusion was the same as yours - however these compensated AWP fuckers were ever allowed to be produced and inflicted upon the general public is still a mystery to me, it's one of the biggest unpublicised scandals in UK history.
Imagine a product in any other industry which had pictures on it of features and characteristics that were simply impossible for the consumer to ever see or use, yet were visually advertised as such - for example a Walkman pictured with earphones/plugs and when you bought it or used it it had NO 3.5mm jack socket. The fines and repercussions from various agencies would be enormous. Yet for 40 years these pieces of shite were allowed to suck in the gullible or ignorant to the tunes of thousands of pounds with often a gambling problem resulting. Your eyes literally welling up on occasion when some poor mug was in the zone pumping hundreds into some poxy machine in a club or arcade chasing the impossible. (Like I did once seeing a lad spend over £200 on a 10p £5 convsersion, almost every spin allowing him to get to the £4 level but whatever he did, busting him on the final step.) In that instance I tried explaining that the MPU board was set so it was impossible to do, just to take the lower prizes and get say £20 back. When down to his last quid he actually did this - achieved a compensatory run of £21 before it went dead. I was hoping he'd smash the thing in, but he looked depressed. Ironically, I had just moved and it turned out this lad lived in the same block of flats as me. He avoided my eye every time he saw me, embarrassed no doubt. Poor fucker.
Excellent post dunover, couldn't agree with you more.
The simple truth of the matter is that compensated machines have, in essence, never worked properly. Compensated machines are inherently a bad idea anyway IMO, but add in coding incompetence and/or corruption, manufacturers that routinely shunted out busted machines (hence the constant need for rechips), along with a regulator that never seemed to understand and/or care about what it was supposed to be regulating - and what we have been left with, for decades, is hundreds of thousands of these machines up and down the UK, sited and available to play by anyone and everyone (including children), that unbeknown to their victims, were playing a bent game.
More fool me, but when I got sucked into them during my addict years (an addiction that very nearly cost me my life on more than one occasion), I was working on the assumption that, y'know, they actually worked properly.
I remember being mystified at the vast amounts of money that machines with a modest jackpot of £6 could take off me, convinced that they'd have to kick something decent back eventually, but of course what I didn't know at the time was if you weren't privy to the information on how to manipulate the machine, you were playing against a very loaded deck, the house was essentially cheating.
As I say in my 'The Death Of The Fruit Machine' video - good riddance to bad rubbish.