A recent message from a friend in the slot community got us thinking about how players conceive the idea of slot machine payouts. In the message, he shared a comment where someone claimed the line hits had been reduced on a very old (think more than 10 years old) game still on a few casino floors.
In it, he was holding this idea (that what used to pay 100 now pays 80, for instance) as an example up about how casinos were lowering payouts on these games. The only problem is that’s not how slot payouts are changed at all.
Game makers actually do not change the payouts in the pay table regardless of the payback percentage the machine is set. Instead, what tends to change is the frequency of various line pays.
Larger pays or bonuses will be perhaps a bit less frequent, and smaller pays and bonuses a bit more frequent, to balance things out while keeping the payout amount of a specific combination itself the same.
By doing these changes under the hood, the idea is to not give us as players much help to know which version of a game is offered at a particular casino.
If someone is equipped with the right tools, such as a PAR sheet, which explains exactly how a slot reaches a certain payback setup, or really studies specific games, there can be ways to discern this information.
But the average slot player won’t be the wiser, and the information this relates to isn’t often available for a game at all. And for the sake of this article, it’s rare enough that we’re not encouraging players to go look for it – you’ll spend more time looking for it than the money you might save (remember these slots will make money off you over time regardless of the payback setup).
In the case of the guy who claimed the line pays have changed, given the age of the game, there’s another thing to consider – old games don’t tend to get touched. The machines aren’t made anymore, the games aren’t made anymore, so they’re not releasing new versions or changing settings to pay you less. They’d rather just take it off the floor and swap in a shiny new machine that’s going to perform better at that point.
So no, you can’t see lower line pay amounts for the same symbols, and even if you did that’s not necessarily a sign of lower payouts – the knobs that get turned for that are outside of our direct view in terms of the frequency of hits and so on.
