Vinyl
Nobody is arguing with the fact that there was an issue with the ORIGINAL version of the game, whereby the free spins WERE paying at the TRIGGERING bet. You don't have to repost screenies....it's already clear.
It was obviously an error of some kind, as the free spins were supposed to pay based on the average bet from the last free spin feature to the next. The question is......was it a malfunction, or was it actually paying as it was programmed (and hence legit)? I think the latter, and that's why MGS have not insisted all wins be recouped etc. Remember, it is the CASINO taking this action in regards to the OP, not MGS.
I have no issue with this at all.
What I take issue with is:
1. Your insistence that MGS said there was a glitch. It did not happen. A casino employee did. Big difference.
2. Your insistence that there was/is some kind of "emptier" or way to "beat" the game. There is not.
In the OLD version, you could accumulate lots of free spins and multipliers on min bet, then trigger the free spins on MAX bet and clean up. It COULD happen.....but here's why it's not an "emptier" or advantage play:
It is NOT possible to know when the free spins will hit. The ONLY way you could ensure a profit is if you could tell with any certainty when the free spins WERE going to hit. Its very possible, and the results I've seen show this, that you will make a LOSS far more times than not by playing small and then ramping up your bet immediately when the free spins accumulate, and that the any wins you manage to get don't cover the bigger bets you made. It's absolutely possible that you could jack up your bet and hit the feature almost right away....and whoopdedoo for you....but unless you can accurately predict when the feature will trigger, the method is useless, as it still relies on too much luck and has too many variables.
Even if you DID have some indication of when the free spins are "due"....which you dont because there is no such thing...there is no minimum or guaranteed payout. Hence, if you were max betting for hundreds of spins waiting for them to hit, which is more than possible, you would NEED a substantial payout just to break even.
Another aspect to consider, and I suspect this is why there wasn't a wholesale confiscation of winnings or communication etc from mgs, is that there is the polar opposite of the min to max bet scenario I.e. the max to min kind. I'm certain there would have been players who reduced their bet as their bankroll declined who hit the free spins betting far LESS than they did initiallly/while accumulating. In THAT case, the CASINO is the big winner.
The change to average bet may not have made the huge difference that we may think, but rather made it "fairer" to those who hit free spins on much LOWER than the majority of their bets. Whilst it may not have evened out completely in regards to the game's bottom line, IMO it's not the disaster that you're making it out to be.
As I said, I've seen stats both publicly and privately from players who deliberately set out to take advantage of this "glitch", and they all show that it was NOT an "emptier" of any kind, and actually COST them money, as at some point you need to "chase" the feature on max bet, and the more you chase, the higher the feature pay has to be just to break even. Given the propensity for the feature to be "low variance" in the way it pays, by the time you hit a big one you'll be so far behind the 8 ball it will be too late.
In any case, it matters not. The game has been updated. It appears from the distinct lack of "I won huge at TDKR" posts here and elsewhere, along with a distinct lack of winnings confiscation complaints in regards to TDKR (bar the OP), along with the fact that a casino rep has stated here publicly that there was no "run" on the game at his casino, added to the fact it took about 10 days for MGS to update the game, that this is NOT a "GOTCHA!!" moment. Rather, it's one of hundreds of your "phantom gotchas" that you create from a mixture of supposition, unrelated tangents, conspiracy theories, a mistaken belief that every slot is a 80's UK fruitie, a misguided belief that you know more than anyone else about everything (e.g. failure to acknowledge valid points and posts thanked etc), and just pure fantasy.
Your "predictions" etc remind me a little of Nostradamus. He made an absolutely huge number of predictions....all conveniently vague....and VERY few of them COULD be construed (only in hindsight of course) to be remotely accurate...and many people say "Wow. Amazing! Blah blah". Fact is, I reckon any one of us could write down 5000 generalized predictions for the next several centuries, and a small percentage will be accurate in some way. I guess my point is that you HAVE been right occasionally when you've made an assessment/assumption etc, but there's so many times you're just way off it takes the shine off the good ones.
You're a smart guy vinyl...and a nice guy by all accounts. What would really make me want to read rather than skim your posts, and take you more seriously, is if you actually acknowledged that there are OTHER smart people here and actually give them some kind of credit, rather than continually ignoring those valid points and going off on a tangent to show/prove you have knowledge about something else. I'm no saint, but i believe in credit where due, and yielding to those with more knowledge or expertise on many subjects, and appreciating the opportunity to learn.
I hope you take this is as constructive criticism, as it is intended.
Taken over the long term, this IS (or was) a proper "emptier". Just because an individual player runs out of money whilst chasing an "empty", it does not mean that the "empty" does not exist. All that is necessary is for the RTP to exceed 100%, and for the player to think in terms of the long term, and NOT be put off when they have a crap bonus round after a long sequence that ends up producing a sub 100% RTP. Over the long term, the RTP will get closer to the TRTP. This was an "emptier" because different methods of play affected the TRTP.
This was only live for a few days, and it seems many potential AVs didn't have the time to make much out of it. Many that tried it didn't make much, or even lost. It was one player who managed a decent cashout, only to have it confiscated, that generated such heated discussion.
You accept that there was a glitch, but there is also quite clearly a cover up going on. If not, why didn't the fix follow the regular procedures, with operators notified as to what had happened, when, and the date of the fix?
Igor explained a little about the procedures that would have taken place were such a glitch to be uncovered and fixed at the level of MGS. None of this happened. There was not even a period where the game was pulled before being reintroduced after the fix. As far as he is concerned, the evidence does not support this having been anything other than a minor issue with the paytable graphic, the underlying slot itself never having been changed. MGS have also been asked directly by a couple of operators, and have said that there was no major glitch with this game, and no major fix therefore applied.
This is not merely an issue of proving the glitch, it's about a case study of the darker side of MGS getting caught in the full glare of publicity. It is also about showing that not all the "wild conspiracy theories" should be summarily dismissed, and tin foil hats awarded.
Igor could find no evidence of this glitch in his casino, so is sure he was not down any money due to it. It's possible that it only affected VIPER casinos, and not Quickfire/Flash ones. This of course reopens the debate as to whether it's the same game in Viper and Flash, which was spurred on by testimony from players who felt that the Viper versions were significantly "tighter" than the Flash versions of some games.
What has been shown though, is that casinos are much better equipped to spot these glitches and nip them in the bud before serious damage can be done. On the face of it, there should have been nothing to alert the casino to this being anything other than a player getting lucky on a bigger bet, and common sense tells operators this is not a long term problem. Clearly, they had some tool that routinely audits the game results for anything worthy of further investigation, a tool that can work with about a week's worth of data, well short of the natural long term cycle and many millions of spins needed to determine whether a slot had drifted significantly from it's expected TRTP.
Had this not been spotted, it would probably still have been working. We would NOT have been seeing anything exceptional in terms of winning screenshots, it would have been a longer term effect of players getting further and further ahead of TRTP the more they played, with some making considerable gains.
What THIS thread seems to show is that the fix may not actually have "fixed" the slot completely, even though it has shut down the "easy emptier" (for those with the time and bankroll to follow the cycle through without flinching).
My "trick" does not rely on predicting anything about when the free spins will hit, it's about "banking" what has already been gained at the lower stake in a manner that ensures it's release at a higher value when the free spins eventually DO hit.
