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[ar argyl53 WANTED $419 Outlaw]

Not bad for a day’s work, no? Obviously still in the very early stages.

[ar argyl53 WANTED $419 Outlaw]

This is probably gonna take me anywhere from a few weeks to a couple of months, spare time permitting. I’ll keep you all updated with the progress until it’s ready to play.

[ar argyl53 WANTED $419 Outlaw]

Haha, 3 of those faces and you trigger Bandit’s Death Stare bonus 😀

Little update for you all; I now have defined reel sets for all 5 reels (though not the final ones, these are pretty much random right now which isn’t good for setting a theoretical RTP). I’ve updated the code so the reels are spinning with sound effect, now when you press and hold down arrow key, reel 1 stops with its first (top) symbol on a random position on its corresponding reel set. This wraps around, such that if the position randomly selected is e.g. the last one, the 2 symbols below will be the first and second from that reel set. I have added a “reel stopping” sound effect.

If I now do this for the other 4 reels, we’ll have a good animation of the reels spinning then each stopping at a random position one after the other.

Later, the selected starting reel position will come from the server API but for now I’m keeping front-end self contained for development purposes.

[ar argyl53 WANTED $419 Outlaw]

Each spin will be 100% random and the RTP will probably be designed to around 96% (as this is a typical figure for most slots) though the probabilities to tune the reel sets and pay table on a multi-line game to achieve a desired figure are much harder to calculate than the trivial 3 reel, one win line example I previously explained. So I’ll have to see what I end up with.

[ar argyl53 WANTED $419 Outlaw]

Obviously you won’t be able to play with real cash, as I am not a licensed slot maker. But I can create something where you register with a username and get a number of credits to play with. Would be interesting to have a site-wide reel race on the game.

I’m mainly a backend programmer and full stack website developer but rich interactive content such as HTML5 games are not really my forté, so this may take me quite a while. I’m basically teaching myself as I go. Yesterday I created the UI mockup, today I exported these to individual game assets and have created a basic UI where you see the reels spinning and a corresponding sound effect is playing. If you press and hold down the down arrow on the keyboard, the reels stop on random positions. This is as far as I’ve got with the front-end. The back-end API will be much easier as I’m within my existing area of expertise there.

This will be a proper client-server game, which works basically the same way as any real slot. So spins results, audit trail of bets and wins, etc. will all be determined server-side and the results sent back to the client for display.

 

[ar argyl53 WANTED $419 Outlaw]

You’ve accidentally upped your stake on a touchscreen. Very unfortunate but no casino is going to give you the money back in that instance. And in all fairness, realistically if that spin had got lucky and hit an £8000 win, would you have contacted support and insisted they take their money back?

[ar argyl53 WANTED $419 Outlaw]

blacko1974 wrote:

Argyll, I’ve read through your recent posts and have been impressed with the knowledge you have in explaining the mathematical process of how slots are based.

My basic thought process with BGT slots are in comparison with the National lottery where there is huge potential and reward but the remaining tens of thousands are unlikely to see it themselves.

Primitive thinking but ultimately true.

 

Cheers matey. Yeah some people like the high volatility of BTG titles and the comparison to the National Lottery is an interesting one….I’ll occasionally buy a lottery ticket at £2, but I won’t buy a hundred of them at £200. I suppose whether people go for these kinds of slot highlights how people play for different reasons with different expectations. I’ve known people who’ll load up £200 online and it’s all gone 10 minutes later because they’ve done a hundred spins on a volatile slot at £2 stake. But their reasoning is they’d rather just go for it and maybe hit a couple of grand if they get lucky than slowly drain the balance on lower stakes and lower volatility games.

When I was playing, my standard mode was to put £100-200 in, then try to build the balance on a high volatility slot but at a low stake, typically around 40p. I found some slots like Bonanza you could easily hit a few hundred pounds off that stake, then I’d try some Novomatics (again, volatile but good potential bonus return). Once I’d got the balance up to £500 or above, I’d try £1-£2 stakes on some lower volatility games like NetEnts to get some features, maybe profit a little, maybe just float, then after a good few hours of entertainment I’d either hit live roulette or go big on something like Captain Venture at maybe £2 stake. That way, even if I had a bad night, by starting at 40p stakes off a £200 balance, I could play a dozen different games for at least a few hours and hit some features before busting out. On a good night, £200 in could become a grand or more.

[ar argyl53 WANTED $419 Outlaw]

Blueprints remind me very much of playing a FOBT in the bookies, as in will take hundreds of pounds in half an hour at £2 stakes and the best you can hope for is about £500 max on a very, very good day. I stayed away from them.

[ar argyl53 WANTED $419 Outlaw]

Bonanza was my go-to with a tenner deposit, on 20p stake. Lot of times I managed to get that tenner up to £50, £100, £200….it’s at least 50 spins at 20p and in reality, you’ll probably get at least 100 out of it if not more. Book of Ra or Captain Venture on 10p for 100 spins is also a reasonably good bet for a profit out of the tenner, though you’d be very lucky to get past about £20 off a single feature on those.

Of course, there’s always the possibility zero is due…. 😀

[ar argyl53 WANTED $419 Outlaw]

Bonanza, much as I know loads of people here hate it, was my favourite slot when I was playing. I had phenomenal success on that one, like it wasn’t unusual for me to see three, five or maybe even more features on it in a single night of play. I would rarely have to push it more than 200 spins to get one and it used to give me 100 spins for the cost of anywhere between 0 and 50. Sometimes I’d be in profit after a run of 100 even without a feature. The only thing that used to really piss me off about it was it would frequently pay a win off say 3012 ways, but if it hit 117,000, every time it would miraculously miss connecting anything. Also when Millionaire first came out, I collected 8 spins for 200x (two full lines of diamonds at x2), which had landed off about 20 spins in.

Every other BTG title was horrific to me. Boring base games, sod all big wins, abysmal features paying an average of about 15x (looking at you, High Voltage), worthless feature buys (bought about a dozen White Rabbit features at 100x each, I think the biggest one paid about 104x and most were a loss, even had two consecutive features pay a grand total of 18x). Watching videos of people doing the buy on Extra Chilli was enough to put me off, never mind playing it.

So I’m not sure BTG have lost their way so much as they never had it. They’ve made one good game under their brand and most people hate that one too. No game gets extra credit from me for “having potential”, every slot I ever played had “potential” for a monster win. Given most of us are never going to hit that full screen of explorers, that 8000x wild line, or whatever – what matters to me is will I get some good, entertaining game play out of it? Will I have a reasonable chance of hitting a fun, at least okay paying if not spectacular feature if I give it 100 spins? Will it float my balance so £100 deposit at £1 stake isn’t gone in five minutes? These are the things I’m looking for in a slot and all too often with BTG (Bonanza excepted) it feels like you either get a really rare super lucky hit or you bust out faster than a frozen pizza can warm up in the oven.

[ar argyl53 WANTED $419 Outlaw]

Little late to the party, but I’m currently trying to get past the giant alligator in the sewers on Leon B. Was surprised and actually a little disappointed by Mr X’s fate in Claire A.

[ar argyl53 WANTED $419 Outlaw]

Highly doubt any online casinos or games are using subliminal messaging in the manner you describe, simply because it would be so easy for anyone on a home computer to detect and expose it (even just by altering the brightness and contrast of their screen). Slots certainly do, however, use a variety of clever psychological tricks in their design to keep you hooked on playing in everything from graphics to music, sound FX and play mode.

[ar argyl53 WANTED $419 Outlaw]

@Haz40 great post. I’ll take a minute to give my perspective on recent events here.

The first thread which eventually got deleted. JB is the poster I was primarily replying to, he said slots are rigged, initially I patiently explained why that isn’t true and how the concepts of random and RTP work. I became less patient after he repeatedly refused to address any of the points I’d taken a lot of time to write and instead replied again and again with nothing but increasingly vile abuse and homophobic slurs (which is kind of weird, as I’m not gay but nonetheless found it sincerely and deeply offensive). After a great deal of provocation, I finally lost my rag and snapped at him just as rudely. That was wrong of me, but I also won’t apologise for finally snapping, for one moment, after that level of provocation and abuse. There’s only so much anyone can put up with.

Mr B – you have made some great contributions to the forum and I’d be just as sad as anyone else to see you leave. You cannot, however, claim your conduct has been perfect. You said me and Biohazard were liars and corrupt multiple times. You got angry at both of us for doing nothing more than explaining several times why and how slot games are random. I wrote an entire thread “Let’s take a look at a slots programming”, not to slate you, not even just for you, but because I believed if I laid out and explained the maths and science of this subject with a complete example, showing the code, showing the probability tables etc. you would at the very least approach it honestly with an open mind. Instead you deliberately tried to bait me by misquoting me, replacing the word “programmed” with “rigged” and again refused to address a single one of the many points I put effort in to writing out. When I then said that wasn’t a sensible reply to the content (and that’s actually how I phrased it – nothing insulting or abusive there), you complained to Seedy that I was being given “free rope to hang you with”.

I don’t care if you or anyone else believes slots are rigged. You didn’t have to reply to my thread at all and you don’t have to interact with me at all if you don’t want to, but seeing as you chose to, you could have had the courtesy and intellectual honesty to answer the points I made. The time I took to write it deserved that.

I don’t have any problem with you on a personal level. While I’ve found it frustrating that you won’t explain what I wrote on the topic you disagree with and why, you were never abusive in the way JB was. Nothing I ever wrote in answering JB was aimed at you.

So that’s me, that’s my perspective on what happened. Water under the bridge as far as I’m concerned.

[ar argyl53 WANTED $419 Outlaw]

Also on the topic of Millionaire, don’t forget even if on each individual gamble, you had an 80% chance of winning, your odds of winning 5 in a row are still a minority 1 in 3. Random probability can be a counter-intuitive trickster like that.

[ar argyl53 WANTED $419 Outlaw]

Part III: A few other addendums.

We’ve seen so far how a randomised slot game can be designed to yield a small house edge. At 3 reels, 3 possible symbols and one win line, it’s about as simple a slot as you can get yet behaves very similarly in terms of RTP, frequency and size of payouts as some of the games you might have played for real cash.

In our example, the machinery of the slot was simple. We took 3 reels and put a total of 20 symbols on each one, made up of X’s, BARs and 7s Most of each reel was made of X’s, then fewer BARS and just a couple of 7s. For the spin, the result was determined by each reel being stopped on the position determined solely by the pick of a random number between 1 and 20. If the 3 positions chosen were all mapped to the same symbol, the corresponding prize was paid.

The slots you play for real are usually a little more complex. We have multiple winlines, all way pays and bonus features.

Multiple win lines: the programming isn’t too different to our example for a 10 or 20 line slot. We still pick one position at random for each reel, only this time we take the previous and next symbols too (wrapping around if we hit the end of our listed symbol arrangement for that reel) to form a grid of symbols, then we check each of the winlines in turn for 3, 4 or 5 matching symbols. We define the winlines by their positions on each reel on the grid:

Line 2:

2-2-x-x-x
x-x-2-x-x
x-x-x-2-x
x-x-x-x-2

So this is very much just a scaled up version of what we did for 1 line. We just have more to check after we stop the reels.

All way pays: The programming for this is the same as above, except instead of checking a grid of winlines, it’s even easier; we just multiply together the number of occurrences of matching symbols on each reel to get the number of winning ways. The only other thing to check for as we go along each reel is that the previous reel had at least one matching symbol.

Bonus rounds, wild reels, other in-game features and enhancements: here’s where the bulk of programming has to go and where we find the most variation in how games work. Basically, the rules of the Gambling Commission don’t force game manufacturers to make these work to any particular pattern. There are lots of ways they can legitimately work. I might, for example, literally just give you 15 free spins which work exactly the same way as regular spins via the random generator but also all prizes are multiplied by 3. But I could also just randomly pick a win between 10x and 500x and award you that and show it to you in the game in the form of 15 free spins with pre-determined results. I could even make it so when your prize was randomly selected, it was ten times more likely to be 10x than 50x. Provided I told you clearly the bonus could award any amount up to 500x and the game overall had a 96% RTP, that’s entirely allowed within the rules as I understand them. The only key requirement is that the fundamental outcome of the bet was random and the game didn’t mislead you about your chances. Same thing with a gamble feature such as the now famous Reel King ladder. I don’t know how that particular game works, but you could build a game with a gamble ladder such that when the initial win came in, the result was already randomly decided that you would win up to the first 3 gambles, then it donks you if you go any further. That’s allowed, provided the initial outcome was random and the odds of winning actually corresponded to what was shown to you (e.g. winning the first 3 gambles on a ladder is a 1 in 8 chance).

In respect of Millionaire, a game which comes up a lot here, my understanding of GC rules – and I am happy to be corrected on this one if I’m wrong – is that if it shows you option B has a 60% chance of winning, option B has to actually have had a 60% chance of winning whenever the result was/is decided.

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