"Relic Raiders" slot is a steaming POS

Balthazar

The Governor
Joined
Aug 14, 2012
Location
Woodbury
Most of you have probably noticed that when you're playing MGS' Tomb Raiders II, you always get the first 4 books pretty quickly but the last one takes forever (and cost a fortune) to get. That's the problem with these slots where you need to collect things in order to get a bonus round. Now if it were purely random, I'd not have a big problem with it, but these slots are blatantly made to quickly get unsuspecting fools at a place where they can't leave, which is a shame.

Relic Raiders is one of these "collect" slots...you need 4 "relics" to get a "bonus prize".

To start collecting relics, you need to get 3 "bonus" symbols on a paying line, from left to right. This will trigger a "pick me" bonus round with hidden stuff: random small prizes, a relic and a tarantula. If you pick the hairy spider, the bonus ends. So the trick is to pick the relic before picking the spider. Each bonus round has one relic and one spider (so a 50% chance to pick one or the other, am I right?;)).

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So I found this game and started playing for the first time earlier tonight. I didn't plan to play much but decided to try it for a few spins to see how it is. I got a bonus round and didn't get a relic, no big deal. Kept playing a little and found my first relic on the next bonus round. Then found the 2nd and 3rd ones on my following 2 bonus rounds. Not bad! 4 bonus rounds, 3 relics!

Now, you need 4 of them to get the bonus prize (and I've no idea what kind of bonus prize it is since it isn't mentionned on the pay table). For all I know it could be 5x stake or 2000x stake. I wasn't going to leave since I got "lucky" :)D) and got the first 3 in only 4 rounds. The slot is extremely boring and doesn't pay, but since nothing on the pay table suggests that you can win anything, I had to conclude that a large part of the RTP was hiding in that bonus*.

Anyways, hundreds and hundreds of spins, two hours and two deposits later, I still didn't get the 4th. Amazing isn't it? Just like Tomb Raiders II! TWELVE ROUNDS where I picked the spider instead of the relic. TWELVE. That's like flipping a coin and landing on "tails" 12 times in a row (odds: 1 chance in 4096). Talk about bad luck. :rolleyes:


On top of that, my relics will expire in 36 hours.:what:

I've been sucked in like a newbie, stuck at chasing a bonus. Rule #1 of slot machines: "never chase anything". Well, this one makes you break that rule by design.

Fool me once...


* I later learned that this POS is running at 90% RTP! 90%! Are you kidding me?:eek:
 
Finally got the 4th relic. Prizes were 12x, 14x, 20x and 40x and I picked the 40x, which is still a joke considering the kind of money spent to get it.

Fun fact: I triggered it during free spins, and during the same free spin session, I triggered the bonus again and it gave me the 1st relic immediately. :rolleyes:

"Randomness" is funny, isn't it?

/sarcasm
 

Ahhh right I've just checked at Redbet and I do remember it now, I loaded it up last year when I was having my Redbet phase, took one look at the paytable, laughed my ass off at the 90% RTP and never so much as thought about it again.

The behaviour you've described doesn't surprise me though, a lot of Netent slots have some oddly non-random behaviours about them.
 
I did a double take there.
Had to check and you are of course correct.
The game used to be listed at rtp of 95% and was recently changed to 90%.

I actually quite like the game but at 90% - ouch!
 
one of the older Netent ones..

Played it once and never again, same with Tomb Raider 2 except i played that twice:)

These slots are straight up evil, especially Relic Raiders. It will give you the first 3 relics very soon in the game then threaten you to lose them after 36 hours. The only reason to do that is to hook the unsuspecting player and make him play for as long as possible on the shitty 90% RTP slot. Of course, the 4th relic won't come before another 1000 spins and with a top prize of 40x, you have no chance to get your money back. Disgusting.
 
I did a double take there.
Had to check and you are of course correct.
The game used to be listed at rtp of 95% and was recently changed to 90%.

How recently? I'm sure I remember seeing it at 90% last year and running a mile, unless I'm hallucinating.

I'm also a little bit concerned to hear the RTP has been changed by 5% by Netent, did the game itself change or were they previously misreporting its RTP?
 
These slots are straight up evil, especially Relic Raiders. It will give you the first 3 relics very soon in the game then threaten you to lose them after 36 hours. The only reason to do that is to hook the unsuspecting player and make him play for as long as possible on the shitty 90% RTP slot. Of course, the 4th relic won't come before another 1000 spins and with a top prize is 40x, you have no chance to get your money back. Disgusting.

I absolutely agree with the fact that the expiry of achievements needed to achieve at least some of the (low) 90% RTP is
terrible, it shouldn't expire at all, but 36 hours is ridiculous...
 
How recently? I'm sure I remember seeing it at 90% last year and running a mile, unless I'm hallucinating.

I'm also a little bit concerned to hear the RTP has been changed by 5% by Netent, did the game itself change or were they previously misreporting its RTP?



I assume they were TRTP at launch and after so much gameplay they are adjusting them to reflect the truer values. I'll ask

They updated a few recently, I'm just having someone go through them.
We are showing 91.6 on Silent Run but that's a typo it's 96.1, apologies RTP fans. :(
 
Just in case anyone's unaware.
You can get the most up to date RTPs on Netent games by clicking on the little "?" in the bottom left corner of the game screen.
 
I assume they were TRTP at launch and after so much gameplay they are adjusting them to reflect the truer values. I'll ask

But TRTP is TRTP, it never changes unless the game changes.

I'd be very worried if Netent couldn't work out the TRTP of their slots before launch, and had to later update them once they'd got the right numbers.

On top of which, as far as I'm concerned the ONLY value that should be displayed on a paytable is the TRTP, what the slot has actually paid out this week, or month, or year - is not the figure that's important!
 
But TRTP is TRTP, it never changes unless the game changes.

I'd be very worried if Netent couldn't work out the TRTP of their slots before launch, and had to later update them once they'd got the right numbers.

On top of which, as far as I'm concerned the ONLY value that should be displayed on a paytable is the TRTP, what the slot has actually paid out this week, or month, or year - is not the figure that's important!

I see what you mean but isn't there a case for saying something like:
OK we estimated that at 95% RTP and after billions of rounds (ok maybe millions) we see that it's paying back 90% so in fairness to players that's the figure we should now state?
 
On top of which, as far as I'm concerned the ONLY value that should be displayed on a paytable is the TRTP, what the slot has actually paid out this week, or month, or year - is not the figure that's important!

Or better yet, how about keeping all the games in the same 1%-2% range? Sometimes I'm trying new slots and I don't think about looking at the RTP for each one of them. On Netent, I just assumed that most slots are ~96% or so. A 6%-7% RTP loss is very noticeable even on a single session, especially on a lower variance game like this one.
 
I see what you mean but isn't there a case for saying something like:
OK we estimated that at 95% RTP and after billions of rounds (ok maybe millions) we see that it's paying back 90% so in fairness to players that's the figure we should now state?

Maybe I'm being naive but the TRTP should come from a mathematical formula, no?
 
I see what you mean but isn't there a case for saying something like:
OK we estimated that at 95% RTP and after billions of rounds (ok maybe millions) we see that it's paying back 90% so in fairness to players that's the figure we should now state?

But that should never happen, any competent software provider should be 100% confident of a slot's T-RTP before it's released, and state that T-RTP on the paytable. I'd expect any slot to have had millions upon millions of spins chucked through it before launch, so that the T-RTP is verified as to being what the slot actually returns. (And remember they won't actually have to 'play' millions of spins, they can just hammer the RNG as fast as their servers will let them, to the extent that they should be able to gather millions of spins worth of data in a relatively short period of time.)

If Relic Raiders has changed from 95% to 90%, I'm very interested to know why!
 
Maybe I'm being naive but the TRTP should come from a mathematical formula, no?

As I understand it you can work out the T-RTP from a mathematical formula provided you have access to all the possible game results, or the reel layouts, or whatever it takes - all stuff that the developer themselves will have access to anyway.

From there I'd expect the slot to be rigorously tested prior to release (and I'm talking tens of millions of spins) to make sure that the T-RTP is the same as the actual RTP.

Anything else would be unforgivably sloppy IMO.
 
As I understand it you can work out the T-RTP from a mathematical formula provided you have access to all the possible game results, or the reel layouts, or whatever it takes - all stuff that the developer themselves will have access to anyway.

If you have 5 reels and X number of symbols with different values on each reel and X number of possible stops, you should be able to easily calculate the TRTP. It gets a bit more complicated with the "rigged" (aka "different") bonus rounds but it's nothing that can't be done strictly on paper. I see absolutely no reason (outside of incompetence) why a slot wouldn't return the mathematical TRTP figure on the long run.

Will wait for Netent's answer as I'm curious to hear that.
 

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