Reel Strips and Multiline Payouts

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No, it just affects the variance of the game. The payout will remain the same for non weighted reel strips.

I agree that the payout would seem higher with these reel arrangements to most people at first. However, when symbols are clumped together like this, that means they are more non-existent on other parts of the reel and the high payouts from matching clumped symbols and the low payouts from not matching the clumped symbols will balance each other out.

This is akin to multiline video poker. The payouts are identical to single line video poker, even when hands like this occur:

Quote: tringlomane

No, it just affects the variance of the game. The payout will remain the same for non weighted reel strips.

I agree that the payout would seem higher with these reel arrangements to most people at first. However, when symbols are clumped together like this, that means they are more non-existent on other parts of the reel and the high payouts from matching clumped symbols and the low payouts from not matching the clumped symbols will balance each other out.

The OP is gone, but I infer it had to do with stacked reel symbols. There are actually a few ways to do stacked symbols. The easiest is to just rearrange a reel strip, in which case you're right (above). But there are other techniques that involve a large stack of TBD symbols, where TBD is determined at spin-time (not before) and therefore doesn't have the same issue. You might have a reel with symbols A, B, C, and D shuffled around, then a big section of fill-in-the-blank which could be any of A, B, C, or D. I'm pretty sure several companies have some manner of IP on this, but I haven't ever really looked at the patents.

^^^

Interesting.

Quote: MathExtremist

The OP is gone, but I infer it had to do with stacked reel symbols. There are actually a few ways to do stacked symbols. The easiest is to just rearrange a reel strip, in which case you're right (above). But there are other techniques that involve a large stack of TBD symbols, where TBD is determined at spin-time (not before) and therefore doesn't have the same issue. You might have a reel with symbols A, B, C, and D shuffled around, then a big section of fill-in-the-blank which could be any of A, B, C, or D. I'm pretty sure several companies have some manner of IP on this, but I haven't ever really looked at the patents.

I have never done it but I like the idea of having static reel weights but random symbol arrangement. I am going to really have to think obout this for new projects.

Quote: DRich

I have never done it but I like the idea of having static reel weights but random symbol arrangement. I am going to really have to think obout this for new projects.

That's different, though. For that, you can just use mini reels.