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Sega sued for ‘rigged’ arcade machine

polygon.com

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Re: Sega sued for ‘rigged’ arcade machine

#201

Post by Caylio »

mafuy wrote: post #180
Caylio wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The machine can only "decide to let you win" if you have the skill to get close, otherwise no chance.

One gives you a chance to win when you are skillful. If you are skillful enough, you will win eventually just by chance. The other may never pay out even if you are 100% accurate. This is a big difference.

Your "big" difference is useless and changes nothing to the topic at hand. Nkrisc claimed that no skill was required at all, only luck, which is clearly false. I was just pointing out this obvious fact. Nice strawman attempt though.

Re: Sega sued for ‘rigged’ arcade machine

#202

Post by wly_cdgr »

rectang wrote: post #60
wly_cdgr wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The obvious solution is to play only critically acclaimed commercial failures :) There are plenty

How many of the critics are on the take, though? Ratings anywhere can't be trusted. The higher the profile of a critic, the more incentive there is to corrupt them, and the more likely it is that their published opinions are just shilling for the commercial entities that own them.

I doubt very many are directly on the take, but I think there's a lot of semi-conscious self-censorship and score / review disconnect that goes on at the well known sites, for all the talk of a hard wall between editorial and advertising. And there's a lot of "content" that is just very thinly veiled PR for an upcoming release. I also think there's a good deal of corruption and nepotism around stuff like the IGF and IndieCade, from my experience swimming in those circles (I did an MFA game design at NYU)

I was mostly just joking around, but I do think there are reliable ways of finding good games:

-look at player scores/reviews on Metacritic

-look for games with many reviews on Steam that have Very Positive or Overwhelmingly Positive ratings but that you've never heard of

-Tim Rogers (look, I kinda hate the guy too, but he's the real deal)

-More seriously (and this is the best option), blogs / Discord communities / Twitter walls of good indie devs like Michael Brough, Zach Gage, Terry Cavanagh, Stephen Lavelle, etc. Like, check out freeindiegam.es, or join Brough's Discord. I am old so I don't know the new waves but you could scroll through a few hundred listings on Itch, look up some Twitter accounts from there, and find them. Most of the very best stuff is of course not on consoles at all but on PC, web, and mobile

Re: Sega sued for ‘rigged’ arcade machine

#203

Post by 542354234235 »

Uberphallus wrote: post #144
TeMPOraL wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> machines that nobody expects to be fair I for sure did. In fact, on my long list of "someday/maybe" projects, there was this one entry sitting for some 15 years now: build a little machine for the claw crane game, that would time a button press perfectly. I just saw the video where Mark Rober does this to another arcade game[0], so I won't bother anymore - I can already guess the outcome. I also don't know anyone e…

> I also don't know anyone else in my circles who thought the claw crane was a game of chance. Maybe it's cultural/regional? Everyone around me gets explained they're rigged as a kid (I'm late 30s), maybe in your country they prefer to feed the excitement/illusion of kids? I'm Spanish, and we have a saying that goes "fallar más que una escopeta de feria", roughly translated to "failing (to work properly) even more th…

There is a difference between a game of skill that is rigged to be much harder to win than it appears and a game of chance. To use your carnival guns as an example, it is one thing for the sights to be misaligned. It is another thing to find out that the guns don’t actually fire pellets most of the time, and only allow a pellet to be fired based on some formula of how long it has been since anyone won the game. The same with the claw games. It is one thing to know that the claws are intentionally weak and lack grip and swing around to dislodge things. it is another thing to know the claw will not pick anything up until a set number of attempts. You can overcome a rigged game of skill by being more skilled. Hell, that is part of the appeal for some people. To figure out how a game is deceptively difficult, and to compensate for it. You can’t overcome of a game of “chance” that forces a certain number of plays.

Re: Sega sued for ‘rigged’ arcade machine

#204

Post by 542354234235 »

abaracadab wrote: post #72
rubyn00bie wrote: post #63

Oh, I thought this was known. I'm not even joking... A few years ago, I was at a local comic shop, and I watched someone (a kid) play the machine and appear to get a "perfect" shot, key went exactly into the fucking hole... but then it just pulled back. No prize! I was stunned when the kid asked an employee essentially "WTF?" and the employee replied "there's a chance the key may not turn even though it's lined up."…

So it sounds like skill + luck: key in the hole gives random chance of winning. Honestly, these kind of lawsuits are ridiculous. People need to sue General Mills for false advertising instead because sugary cereals causing diabetes; or any other big-food company brainwashing children on YouTube kids.

It isn’t luck, because the game has a 0% chance of winning until X number of loses. That is like saying that getting heads on a coin toss is a game of luck, except they are actually using a double tails coin for 700 tosses. A game of luck or chance requires some chance that you could actually win on a given play.

Re: Sega sued for ‘rigged’ arcade machine

#205

Post by 542354234235 »

nkrisc wrote: post #79
abaracadab wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So it sounds like skill + luck: key in the hole gives random chance of winning. Honestly, these kind of lawsuits are ridiculous. People need to sue General Mills for false advertising instead because sugary cereals causing diabetes; or any other big-food company brainwashing children on YouTube kids.

That’s just luck.

It isn’t luck, because the game has a 0% chance of winning until X number of loses. That is like saying that getting heads on a coin toss is a game of luck, except they are actually using a double tails coin for 700 tosses. A game of luck or chance requires some chance that you could actually win on a given play.

Re: Sega sued for ‘rigged’ arcade machine

#207

Post by 542354234235 »

megameter wrote: post #31
Cerealkiller050 wrote: post #2

I remember seeing and playing this on a cruise ship. It was a dollar per try, and I shoved in 5 bucks. By the 4th try it was NOTICEABLE that if you press the button at the "right time", there was a lag before it overshot it and you failed. I pretty much could guess that something like the article discusses was at work, and was simply more a game of luck. Obviously I stopped after that, as a pure luck game is not as f…

Like with gambling devices, redemption games all seem to have operator-adjustable payout. I recall playing "Stacker" for a little while in the 2000's. It used an LED dot display for gameplay, which was a simple timing game where you "built" a tower by stacking up the blocks, with it getting faster at each level. What it did was exactly as you describe: it had a minor reward level that you could always win, and then a…

> Like with gambling devices, redemption games all seem to have operator-adjustable payout.

This isn’t really the same because most gambling devices are regulated so that, while you can adjust payout percentages, you cannot remove random chance. That any given play has some percent chance of winning, even if it is adjusted very low or dynamically adjusted. This game is simply forcing a certain number of guaranteed loses before considering a payout. That isn’t luck.

Re: Sega sued for ‘rigged’ arcade machine

#208

Post by 542354234235 »

bnycum wrote: post #44

I went to an arcade this month for the first time in years and it shocked me just how many games of “luck” they had. It was easily the majority of games there. Felt like I was in a kids casino with no regulations. Also felt like a sucker because you had to pre-pay for a card with credits, and there wasn’t any games that took more than a minute to play so I ended up playing them.

>Felt like I was in a kids casino with no regulations.

Exactly. At least casinos are regulated so that, even if the odds are bad, they still have to be “random chance”. If I put my money in a slot machine, there is some percent, no matter how low, that I could win on any play. With this machine, and likely many others, its literally a 0% chance for some ridiculous number of plays. That is the difference between a game of luck and a scam. And that’s not even getting into that the game is pretending to be a game of skill, while actually being a scam of a game of chance.

Re: Sega sued for ‘rigged’ arcade machine

#209

Post by HarryHirsch »

Caylio wrote: post #194
nkrisc wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the very last step of the process is that the machine decides if you won or not, it's not a game of skill. It takes a degree of skill and coordination to pull the lever on the slot machine, yet we don't call them a game of skill because of that. If you're 100% accurate and you still lose, it's a game of chance.

Every winner will have made a skillful shot, hence a skillful shot is required to win. It's a combination of both therefore you obviously can't claim no skill is required at all. Nobody says that a slot machine is a game of skill because nobody considers having the coordination to pull a level to be a skillful attribute.

Moat losers will have made an equally skillful shot, and the ratio of losers to winners is >> 100 : 1 because that's what the device has been programmed to do.

Re: Sega sued for ‘rigged’ arcade machine

#210

Post by Caylio »

HarryHirsch wrote: post #209
Caylio wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every winner will have made a skillful shot, hence a skillful shot is required to win. It's a combination of both therefore you obviously can't claim no skill is required at all. Nobody says that a slot machine is a game of skill because nobody considers having the coordination to pull a level to be a skillful attribute.

Moat losers will have made an equally skillful shot, and the ratio of losers to winners is >> 100 : 1 because that's what the device has been programmed to do.

Nobody said that skill was sufficient to win, I am simply pointing out the obvious fact that it's still required (in response to nkrisc who claimed that no skill was required at all, only luck).
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