We never got a resolution of the other complaint, but this post from KK is VERY telling as to why THIS issue is also appearing to be going nowhere.
Well surprise surprise, the MicroGaming person I met face to face at ICE who promised to get back to me about this glitch, never did.
Also my follow up chasing e-mail was ignored.
So situation normal, MG sweeping the issue under the carpet and waiting for everyone to go away.
Don't know what happened to the PAB HIGHIQ submitted - he hasn't posted or contacted me about this issue for ages now.
KK
What REALLY set the cat among the pigeons in the current case is that it started not as a player questioning whether the game was working properly, but as a CASINO voiding winnings because they were 100% certain it was paying out too MUCH.
The deafening silence from Microgaming is as expected, and does not mean there is no glitch. It seems MGS have this "neither confirm nor deny" attitude to anything of this nature, something we might expect from MI6, GCHQ, or the NSA.
One thing has become clear, there IS a glitch, yet Microgaming are telling everybody there isn't one.
It's now possible that there is STILL a glitch that could be of advantage to the player, but it isn't the obvious one it appeared to be initially from reading the initial set of rules and paytables.
We could be entering a very dangerous era for operators. These ever more complicated slot games are trending to what we have here in the UK in our "Fruit Machines". These are VERY complex and feature rich games, and they are stuffed full of "edge cases". This leads to the occasional software slip up, and a few of these create the "emptiers" that pro players love, but arcade operators hate.
At least the UK Fruit Machine operators are protected somewhat by the limited hopper size on the games, either £125 or £250, after which a faulty machine runs out of coins and goes into "call attendant" mode, hence the nickname of "emptier" for such faults. Online operators have no such protection, they have to spot the problem during audit, otherwise it's too late, the player has walked off with the money.
Most problems online turn out to be display errors, or errors in the rules and paytables, with the game itself operating as it should. This case is different, as we have a casino actually voiding winnings based on there actually being a significant enough problem with the game that they can't just let the bets stand and yank the game.
Despite the fact that one casino is calling "malfunction voids play", the only things we KNOW MGS have fixed for this game are the rules, where they now correctly state "weighted average bet", and a minor bug in how the game is displayed in the lobby, where it was followed by some odd looking characters after the name. My MGS casinos also went into "monthly update mode" twice more after the initial formal monthly update, showing that two patches so far have been applied this month by MGS after the main new games update.
If players are still getting paid too much in a certain "edge case", it's still a problem for operators. The OP must have been particularly clever about exploiting this bug as it seems that most who have seen the discussion, and tried for themselves, have decided it offers no long term advantage, with some reporting some pretty low session RTP values despite trying the exploit as detailed initially.
Maybe now we should try out the Bane split wilds edge case to see if this is paying more than it should.
From the screenshots, I can see that the weighted average bet is not actually shown as the stake for each free spin, so this is not an indication as to whether the initial suspect is the bug in question that caused the casino to void the winnings.
I feel that we are REALLY going to have to pile on the pressure to get Microgaming to cooperate and tell even operators what is going on, let alone the players. It seems the last issue just went away after KK was ignored after being promised a reply at ICE.
Had the casino not voided the OPs winnings, it would have been much easier for MGS to stonewall until the issue went away. It's easy to argue that players who think they have spotted an error merely don't fully understand the complexities of the game. This is how it has been with Fruit Machines, and is also why some "emptiers" last for months, if not years, before the manufacturer wakes up to the fact that it is THEY that don't fully understand their game, and that unknown to them, it pays at an RTP of 100%+ if played a certain way.