Originally Posted by tableplay View Post
Originally Posted by AxelWolf View Post
Nice find, I posted it on WOV.
Thank you. The podcast guest, Chicken Little, didn't realize or decided to omit the fact that the distinction between ploppy and non-ploppy is blurring. That is, ploppies will often take down the plays they create themselves (some ploppies are going to mistakenly get kicked out). Ploppies simply enjoy long-cycle persistent state games (and short cycle Scarab-like games for that matter). Manufacturers noticed that Joe Six Pack likes persistent state games and that's why they keep coming out with more and more of them. When they tried reducing them to a trickle in the post Vision/S-2000 series game era, they noticed a drop in revenue so they resumed making a lot of them. The revenue loss created by alienating this group by gradually increasing the percentage of perceived persistent-state games and decreasing the percentage of actual persistent-state games will be greater than that of just keeping a 10%/90% floor balance of persistent state/non-persistent state games as is and allowing anyone to play them. Chicken Little probably realizes that you have to throw the baby (ploppies) out with the bath water to reduce or eliminate APs since he has done a deep dive of the analytics, but he sure as hell isn't going to tell casino executives this (that you are going to have to put up with mis-identifying a lot of regs in order to get at all the APs) when he consults with them since he has to convince them that this problem is solvable.

One other comment. Running cards allows casino analytics teams to identify which games are persistent-state AP games. This is done as follows:
1) Identify winning players by querying for loyalty cards which show an aggregate profit
2) Pulling the game history of this identified subset of players to identify which games these always-profitable players are playing
3) Reducing the number of these identified games on the floor

Obviously, there is no way many advantage players will stop using loyalty cards as this is large percentage of their revenue - however that is how casino dumb-shits are learning which games/players to remove (to their detriment since it will alienate ploppies or they will mistakenly 86 poppies as noted above).
I think there's a way to solve some of the new machine Vulturing problems, it won't stop Advantage Players, but it will cut down on Vultures.

In its simplicity, figure out how to give the ploppies back their earned value before they leave the machine. For example, once the game hits positive territory or close, and once someone cashes out or makes their last spin have a notice pop up on the machine saying, "Hey valued player if you are planning on not continuing on this machine before you leave make sure to click here to get your free bonus spin or collect your earned/free winnings.

I can't remember the name now, but I believe there was a video poker game with a wheel (Wheel Poker?)that came out probably around the time that The Cosmo opened and did something similar to this.

Yes, I understand there are all kinds of problems with a simplistic method such as I described, but I believe a think-tank that involved Advantage Players could come up with something pretty damn good similar to this.