Game experience analysis

Hello, everyone,

These days I was thinking about the following topic: "How can I analyse a slot game experience". To be more precise, if I have paytable and reels of a slot game - how can I analyse what "experience" gives to the player in terms of prizes, dynamics, game behaviour(eg. is it attractive to be played). Something like the game volatility, but reelset, prizes and everything else that can be analysed, included. Every game metric can be used as long as it can be useful to make a reasonable conclusion. Does anyone else have had experience with such analysis. Every book(maybe game design), paper(math) or idea can be helpful to try it out. I find it difficult to analyse stohastic results(such as let's say 100 player spins) and make an assumption for the game or analyse big portion of the game(let's say 100 million spins) and make an assumption for player experience(which will be way less than 100 million spins).
I would love to see your thoughts about the topic and every discussion can be helpful.

- One casino enthusiast

As a mathematician, all I can do is get certain parameters like the volatility and bonus frequency within industry norms. Beyond that, it's up to the artists. Even then, you never know what will catch on with the public. It's a numbers game, you have to put out a lot of product and hope enough games sell and catch on to meet expenses.

I absolutely agree with you that you can never know what exactly will be played and there is no a recipe for this. Do you believe that certain values of volatility or bonus frequency are “more desire” than others? Maybe too frequent or too rare bonuses are contributing to worse player experience.
Thank you, for your opinion!

I watch my in laws play -EV slots to see what keeps them hooked. The false perception of being ‘so close’ to a big jackpot is the main attraction. ‘If this was a gold bar instead of a donkey I would have hit the jackpot’ is spoken frequently.

Quote: Enthusiast

These days I was thinking about the following topic: "How can I analyse a slot game experience".
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I cannot answer as to what ploppies find attractive about a gaming experience. I do know that I like control over the speed of play and especially the speed of bonus rounds. I like 'fast spin' and 'turbo' options. One MGM casino refused to turn on 'fast spin' for me. A manager said gaming had to be involved to make the change and he would not do it. I left immediately.

I like early buyout offers on bonus rounds, even though I can never be sure that the EV is equivalent to playing out the bonus round. For example, '21 Gambler' and Anything But 6' allow you to collect at any point in the bonus round. In this case, there is a clear optimal strategy for collecting versus playing on.

'China Shores' allows you to trade your bonus spins for a single randomly chosen amount that is proportional to the number of spins remaining. You can even play some of the spins and then take a buyout for the remainder (so long as you have 20+ bonus spins remaining). This is a great design. I assume the casino wants to incent you to get back to real coin-in, so I hope the buyout EV is always as good or better than the bonus spins.

This sounds like a good suggestion when designing a feature or functionality!

I have seen players with 800 free spins. They can be stuck at a machine for over an hour before they can cash out even if they spin stop. If they let the spins play out, they will be stuck there even longer. My longest bonus round was 45 minutes. China Shores is programmed to give you a max payout of about three times what you might be expected to earn from playing the spins. The min payout is about 5% of the expected value. I have often gambled on the early buyout and received the min 12% of the time and the max 5% of the time. Receiving the min on a 300 game buyout really sucks.

Quote: Mental

I have seen players with 800 free spins. They can be stuck at a machine for over an hour before they can cash out even if they spin stop. If they let the spins play out, they will be stuck there even longer. My longest bonus round was 45 minutes. China Shores is programmed to give you a max payout of about three times what you might be expected to earn from playing the spins. The min payout is about 5% of the expected value. I have often gambled on the early buyout and received the min 12% of the time and the max 5% of the time. Receiving the min on a 300 game buyout really sucks.
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Those ridiculous ones? Some of them don't have slam stop enabled as I once found out to my great annoyance on a must-hit. I've never been so irritated by winning.

One possible thought is to look at side bets of table games and see which tend to be popular. For instance PairPlus in 3CP has an opportunity for 35/1 (or 40/1 50/1 depending on the pay table) but includes some 1/1 payouts, so has a reasonable hit frequency. Other bets include Jackpots, e.g. on Pai Gow Poker, so have high payouts but very low hit frequency. Some games feature a mandatory bet that includes a chance to be very lucky!

in the UK some machines have a symbol indicating whether they have a high or low risk, typically that means the bonus pays less often but pays more, or the bonus payouts are smaller and more likely, or the machine includes lots of small prizes (e.g. 10p/20p wins on a 50p bet).