I figured that you probably have a top-notch system. Earlier this year I upgraded my Internet connection from 2M/2M to 10M/10M but I didn't notice any increase in the playing speed. So it seems that a fast computer has more effect on the spin speed than Internet connection.
Yes and obviously this time reduction gives a small advantage to those with optimized systems. I find this a bit problematic with these tournaments.
Internet speed makes no difference, although it's reliability does. Only small packets are exchanged, and much of the action is concentrated at the tournament server and the player's PC. The tournament server seems to introduce a lag whenever a fast PC hits it with two consecutive spin requests that are less than 3 seconds apart. This can happen during a string of "naked spins". The fact that this is a DELIBERATE delay imposed, and not a problem with the internet in general, is that it follows a VERY specific pattern of cause being followed by a specific effect. The effect (delay) is always very long in terms of the software ij general, and is around 5 seconds. The delay "so called communication problem" will then be repeated if the subsequent spin is requested within 3 seconds after the completion of the previous one. By pressing "spin" in order to fully maximise speed, you can set up a permanent delay effect, however, this can be fixed purely and simply by deliberately NOT pressing "spin" and watching 5 seconds count by on the timer, and then the delay will vanish on subsequent spins until you hit another naked spin sequence and end up sending two "spin" requests too close together again.
This very clear cause and effect relationship means that as far as I am concerned, the excuses trotted out by the various MG casino support reps who try to "help" those who complain are at best bullshite, and at worst lies to cover up what I believe was an attempt to rig the tournaments to slow down the pace of play.
The intention may have been to make it seem fairer, but they have ended up making the whole thing look decidedly "rigged".
When these tournaments first came out, they crashed my old PC, and during the process of diagnosing the fault (and before getting the new PC) was able to determine that this delay simply was not part of the program, and that some "under the hood" tweaking of the OS could produce playing speed as good as could be achieved on "normal" Thunderstruck and Tomb Raider". The speed I achieved was around 1800 spins per minute on the normal slots, and so I suspect a similar speed was potentially available in the tournaments. I achieved this on a slow 500MHz Windows 98 PC, yet on my dual core Windows XP PC, with 2.8GHz cores, I cannot achieve anything approaching the same spin rate as when I first tried this on the Windows 98 PC. This happened over one fateful weekend, where many complaints hit the forum about an inability to connect to the tournaments, inability to play, and was preceeded by an MG update that completely re-downloaded the EXISTING tournament slot games, then just Tomb Raider and Thunderstruck. This itself was part of the problem, as some of the problems were due to the fact that the update DELETED the old tournament slots and began to download the newer versions, while at the same time players were trying to enter tournaments for slots they had played before, and thus expected the games to still be in place, and it didn't ocurr to them that their problems were partly down to the games no longer being present on their PC during the upgrade process.
No-one knew what happened, but out of interest I re-ran my earlier experiments, and found the one change, the appearance of this "lag" when spin requests hit the tournament server at less than 3 second intervals.
After they introduced this change, and cleared up the subsequent mess, complaints about these tournaments INCREASED, and they were beset with errors, and participation rates dropped. This is STILL happening, as they simply run so slowly as to no longer be exciting. It is like playing the normal MG casino to have the spin lag we used to complain about present for EACH and EVERY spin we play. We soon get fed up as the lobby constantly lags behind our adrenalin induced desire to compete by spinning as fast as we can - it is like being an olympic swimmer having someone grab our ankle & keep pulling us back while we are going all out to beat the others that we might see are already ahead of us
This thread is more of the same, another change that has made the event look even less fair than before, as now it has rebuys, and 100% of the extra revenue goes straight to Microgaming, and 0% to the prize pool. Worse, since the continue time is cut by half as well as the continue coins, no-one can use all the coins they have bought, whereas under the old system, and coins left over after the first round would most likely get played off later as less new coins were given, but another full 10 minutes of time.
Now, we are back to the old situation, where the number of coins that can be played is related to how good a PC the player has. Getting too many POOR bonus rounds can also be a disadvantage, as bonus spins play through much mor slowly than normal spins. This makes any kind of "tactic" impossible, whereas in a genuine event there would be considerable leeway to adopt tactics such as playing less than max coins/lines, or selecting 24 @ 2x instead of 12 @ 4x for the bonus round. Some would like to go even further in being given tournament dollars, and being able to select different denominations, as well as different lines and numbers of coins.
One thing might come out of this, as it will be far easier to see how much is flowing IN to this tournament, and compare this with the 20K going OUT in prizes. I would be expecting an average of 95% back in prizes long term, but I believe players would be horrified by the actual figure when taking account of the rebuys and their sequence of continues. I believe the RTP for this tournament is very much less than 95%, and is a very bad deal for most players. It has entertainment value, but far too little of the take finds it's way back to players.
Unlike the regular games, there are no overall RTP figures available for these tournaments, making it look as though it is not something MG want players to clearly see.
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