The lights go out, one by one...

rogerthymes · Post by **rogerthymes** » Wed Mar 07, 2012 12:06 am

Northern Monkey wrote:Ant and Dec Piggy Bank thing which i'd totally forgotten about

Which unit pray tell?

It's not the Gamesnet, not the Open and not the Paragon. Honestly can't remember what it's called, they're rare-ish though a few more seem to be springing up. They have WWTBAM celeb version on too. Will make a note of the make next time i see it.

exactly · Post by **exactly** » Wed Mar 07, 2012 12:22 am

The situation is pretty dire up north. I reckon about half the machines in the big cities have vanished. And bear in mind that there were only ever more quiz machines in Scotland because most councils limit the number of fruit machines to 3 in any pub (2 in edinburgh). Under the new regs quiz machines will be treated no differently to fruit machines duty wise so will be the first to be removed.

quizard · Post by **quizard** » Wed Mar 07, 2012 12:51 am

rogerthymes wrote:It's not the Gamesnet, not the Open and not the Paragon. Honestly can't remember what it's called, they're rare-ish though a few more seem to be springing up. They have WWTBAM celeb version on too. Will make a note of the make next time i see it.

Ind:e/Indego ? I saw a new version of these with a few new games a while ago although Jiggy Bank was definately not one of them. The strange cabinet had a rail around the front that you could hold on to LOL.

cp999 · Post by **cp999** » Wed Mar 07, 2012 9:46 am

exactly wrote:The situation is pretty dire up north. I reckon about half the machines in the big cities have vanished.

Oh dear, I do wonder why you keep attempting to spread disinformation. Your agenda is so transparent.

exactly · Post by **exactly** » Wed Mar 07, 2012 11:04 am

Not sure what disinformation I have posted; gaming duty and council bylaws are pretty easy to find out about. As for machines, I think youd have to be pretty optimistic not to have noticed them disappearing from chain pubs, bowling alleys, busy independents etc , leaving aside those that go when screams/harvesters are refurbed and when the 2nd machine is removed from pretty much all out of town wetherspoons. As others have pointed out, there is an increasing number of wetherspoons with no quiz machine. Nil satis's experience is similar to mine recently but perhaps the drop off is less obvious if you visit the same places regularly. Good luck

cp999 · Post by **cp999** » Wed Mar 07, 2012 11:29 am

I checked my records. "Half the machines in the big cities" is a gross exaggeration. The loss over the last year is about 10% and that is partly due to pub closures. This is partly compensated for by discoveries of additional machines: suppliers do tend to put them somewhere! I was at least partly responsible for four removals from bowling alleys - two being due to an itbox empty I did religiously every four days over a nine month period. It is testimony to Gamestec's ineptitude that, despite these two machines making almost no money during this time, they didn't update the game in question to the undoable program. Disagree re chain pubs and as I visit almost all chain pubs in this area I think I'm in a position to comment; I can offhand only think of one JDW in Scotland without a quiz machine as of last visit. Two machines moving to one within the same pub doesn't equate to a one machine loss as cash throughput increases noticeably afterwards on the single machine; the two machines reduced to one policy is incidentally more applicable to Fair City JDWs rather than the Sims/Gamestec ones.

cp999 · Post by **cp999** » Wed Mar 07, 2012 11:46 am

P.S. re Harvesters, might be something to do with them being Sceptre and thus not properly floated...

grecian · Post by **grecian** » Wed Mar 07, 2012 4:51 pm

Interesting thread. I don't play enough nowadays to be able to give an informed view.

Having said that, I have been working at my current office (in densely populated area of central London) for just over a year and in that time have had (I think) 13 machines within walking distance to play on at lunchtime (albeit probably a maximum of 12 at any one time). We're currently down to five: four pubs (three Greene King and one generic pubco) have jettisoned their single SWP; a Wetherspoon has gone from two to one machine; a generic pubco pub has done likewise; and one bar has shut entirely. I don't think any of that will be due to my (admittedly fairly frequent) play on the cabinets in question, either.

Quizmaster mentions MPD as an example of an excellent recent game, and he's right, it is. Nice production values, good question set, and no doubt takes a lot of money from punters. Feels like it has enough spoilers to make life difficult for top pros, too, although I'd like to see how the Channel One specialist Suri is doing on it! But MPD is the exception to the rule that there has been a lot of dross out recently. For me, the key games remain things like MotD, BAM etc. which have been out for a fair old while now. And I can see that those games are the kind of games which will turn off Joe Public pretty sharpish when he gets some brutal Football or Entertainment question a few questions in.

It feels like the industry, in its hurry to try to protect games from top pros following HMRC's crusade against luck-based features, has made games too tough to appeal to anyone but those top players - in other words, the completely unintended consequence. That's certainly why I play less - I feel one needs to be a full-timer now to make money off machines - if one is a full-timer, it seems possible to do very well, but dabblers like me are going to find the going difficult. Fair enough I suppose, but if someone like me who spent *years* playing SWPs doesn't want to play, I reckon the industry could be in a spot of bother.

Nil Satis · Post by **Nil Satis** » Wed Mar 07, 2012 5:30 pm

me, about 6 weeks ago wrote:punters are being put off by the ludicrous difficulty levels and low prizes on offer, keen players even at your level are being discouraged for similar reasons (albeit that the difficulty issue is obviously at a considerably different threshold!), which only leaves ... A few "top boys" who will survive because they have to, unless they find something else to do with their time. This is a wonderful example of the law of unintended consequences to set at the feet of the companies that makes the games and machines - the very people they are so scared of might well be the last people playing the things before the light is metaphorically switched off.

;-)

grecian · Post by **grecian** » Wed Mar 07, 2012 5:34 pm

That said, I'm cheered by the suggestion that there are some extant Jiggy Banks somewhere.

tonkarentino · Post by **tonkarentino** » Wed Mar 07, 2012 9:56 pm

exactly wrote:The situation is pretty dire up north. I reckon about half the machines in the big cities have vanished. And bear in mind that there were only ever more quiz machines in Scotland because most councils limit the number of fruit machines to 3 in any pub (2 in edinburgh). Under the new regs quiz machines will be treated no differently to fruit machines duty wise so will be the first to be removed.

May I ask where up north starts?

The Harvester thing is nationwide. They've clearly made a decision to remove all types of "gambling" machines.
Personally I never really understood the move by Wetherspoons to put second and even third terminals in their pubs. It's hardly surprising that given the current down turn one of them has been relocated. There has always been a lot of JDW with only one machine.

cp999 · Post by **cp999** » Thu Mar 08, 2012 12:11 am

Nil Satis wrote:Quote Originally Posted by me, about 6 weeks ago View Post
punters are being put off by the ludicrous difficulty levels and low prizes on offer, keen players even at your level are being discouraged for similar reasons (albeit that the difficulty issue is obviously at a considerably different threshold!), which only leaves ... A few "top boys" who will survive because they have to, unless they find something else to do with their time. This is a wonderful example of the law of unintended consequences to set at the feet of the companies that makes the games and machines - the very people they are so scared of might well be the last people playing the things before the light is metaphorically switched off.
;-)

If the industry is so scared of people like me, their judgement is seriously to be questioned. There are so few genuine pros left. It's not like the 90s when we were going around battering the living daylights out of everything and I used to regularly see other "real" players. Additionally I, and my peers, cannot be everywhere simultaneously.

Nil Satis · Post by **Nil Satis** » Thu Mar 08, 2012 1:25 am

cp999 wrote:There are so few genuine pros left.

If there are more than five genuine pros left in the whole country, I would be amazed. By "genuine" I mean to exclude those guys who scrape a living as they are not really capable of doing anything else, and those like me for whom machines are not our primary source of income.

cp999 wrote:If the industry is so scared of people like me, their judgement is seriously to be questioned.

There are so many good reasons to question their judgement - the Sceptre underfloating fiasco, the inability of Gamesnets to run any worthwhile game reliably, most new game releases (Candidate No. 1 - Premier League Darts), the way ItBoxes were allowed to go from undisputed market leaders to all but extinct in just a couple of years - that this point should surely not be in doubt.

exactly · Post by **exactly** » Sat Mar 10, 2012 10:06 am

Nil Satis wrote:If there are more than five genuine pros left in the whole country, I would be amazed. By "genuine" I mean to exclude those guys who scrape a living as they are not really capable of doing anything else, and those like me for whom machines are not our primary source of income.

If a pro is in his forties and has done nothing else for 20 years then he is probably not capable of doing much else now. They have no choice but to keep going I suspect.

cp999 · Post by **cp999** » Sat Mar 10, 2012 10:25 am

exactly wrote:If a pro is in his forties and has done nothing else for 20 years then he is probably not capable of doing much else now. They have no choice but to keep going I suspect.

That's so far off the mark it's comical. I don't think it's in my best interests to elucidate.