Sometimes, weird things happen when you’re attempting to play a slot machine.
Isn’t it weird how a drink on the console affects the machine?
Connie H.
It is a bit odd, and hopefully as slot makers get better with the cabinet design, these issues will be less likely to happen. And fortunately, the issue itself is somewhat benign.
For those who have not encountered it, the push to touchscreen bet panels, and bigger ones at that, have yielded some unintended side effects.
On quite a few occasions, we’ve seen players struggling to get a bet to register when they touch the bet panel, only to notice they had a drink resting on the edge of it, and the computer inside the slot was registering that touch and not the touch of the wager.
There are multiple types of touchscreens, including single touch and multi-touch. The latter can detect presses in multiple places at once, but having such a technology installed tends to be a bit more expensive, and was especially so on some of the earlier machines with touchscreen bet panels.
In areas where multiple touches are less likely to be expected, that single touch option seems attractive. But the flip side to that is if something is on the screen, it may not be able to recognize some other press at the same time.
So that leads to the weird scenario where it seems like the game isn’t responding to a touch, because it’s already detecting some other touch.
We still have fears over friendly but overzealous cocktail servers slapping a napkin and drink down on the bet panel and accidentally making a wager where the buttons are closer to the edge, so in some ways we’ll happily take the problem of there being a bigger border if that lessens that risk instead.
In the meantime, next time you have trouble getting a bet to register, check and see if anything is on the bet panel – for many, resolving that gets the machine to act more normally.
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