Could a slot manufacturer put all the payouts in certain bet levels of the machine? That seems to be the implied question from today’s submission:
Are slots programmed to pay out at every bet level and denomination?
Bob
Yes, all the bet levels and denominations are programmed to pay out to match the payback settings chosen by the casino.
They can’t put all the good stuff in one location, because they don’t know what a player is going to choose, and the games have to pay a certain percentage back to pass third-party lab testing and meet the regulations of various jurisdictions.
With that lack of control over that aspect of the machine, the only real solution is to ensure every bet level at every denomination can meet the expected payback that is selected by the casino.
We know some players like to jump around bet levels and denominations – it’s something multi-denomination machines let us do at a level that wasn’t possible a number of years ago when most games were single denomination.
Players may think they’re doing so in an effort to “find” where the money is hidden in the game, but it’s not really doing anything but changing when you hit the spin button. Whether that improves or hurts your outcome, we never will know, because we don’t know what spin would’ve happened without anything changing.
This is one of those things we discourage players from worrying about too much. Game makers go through a lot of effort to balance games out at every bet level, and so you don’t need to worry you might have chosen a bet level that doesn’t have payouts – they’re there, even if in a given session they don’t always surface. That’s just the volatility of a game shining through and the next session can always go quite differently.
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