Bioware.. Please release MORE slot machines

Hehe, yeah, I cant see them doing another, maybe in 12 months after the sour taste has gone, but even then, I can imagine any person in the studio even mentioning the words slot machine being huddled in some corner while everyone bashes them with sticks and chairs.

/signed

As long as they actually have Cartel Market Certs dropping and maybe add a few more cool rare drops. I do like being able to get the old reputations.

how about no. They proved, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that they have no clue what they're doing with such a thing.

We have no need for anymore of their stupid faux machines and money-grabbing bait-and-switching.

As the thing stands it's almost completely worthless. We don't need that kind of garbage clogging up a slot in the gamble packs. Let's get something USEFUL in it's place.

No more faux slot machines. Not after that abortion of a debacle with the contraband one. At least not unless they tweak it to be useful again (without it giving out too much, like it was.)

I think they took advantage of the players enough with the first one.

*giggle* Yup, I can totally see that. Banished from the corner with the espresso machine, and shunned for the week, after the bashing with sticks and chairs.

We want more interactive stuff for our strongholds

Well, this was a bone head move followed by yet another bonehead move, compounded by even more bonehead moves that demonstrates to me they are incapable of finding a sensible medium.

It's either one extreme or the other with these guys, certainly it is with this issue IMO, so they are paralyzed by their own lack of understanding the playerbase.

And that is the silliest part of all. If the items purchased with certs were bound and they upped the cert drop rate, dropped the fail rate (rolled the rest into a token) it would likely make the machine more than appealing enough to the masses.

That is not likely a difficult change. But they seem to be incapable of understanding that, so the only solution is likely to avoid the issue all together.

I would like more slots for my casino room, if not just for the diversity on the floor.

I still think that they could add companion gifts, 1-3 slot tokens (instead of 1), more than 1 vehicle and maybe random crafting mats instead of jawa junk (weighted towards lower tier).

I think now that everyone knows what to expect with (possible) future slot machines, what they drop shouldn't be an issue for anyone.

Everyone knows that they're really just for reputation gain purposes and not an alternative way to get crafting mats/cartel certificates.

Very few people deny that the community got the shaft with the previous slot machine. People dropped real-life money to get them or spent millions of in-game credits to buy them to take advantage of the drop rates. Then it got nerfed. We all know future slot machines will likely have similar drops rates to what they are now, so releasing more shouldn't be an issue for anyone. If you don't want future slot machines, be it because you're butthurt, already have max rep with that faction, are anti-gambling, etc. don't buy it.

Enough said.

Fixed that for you, LA.

Up to 3 tokens back, not just 2? (Nightlife event had a 2 token payout, but never a 3 token payout.) I wonder how that would balance out if they did that alongside an excessive failure rate close to what the current version of the cartel machine has? Suppose that 40% of your rolls you lose the token, 10% you get the token back, 6% you get double tokens, and 4% you get triple tokens... leaving a 30% drop rate for actual prize results of any kind...

So theoretically we drop in 100 tokens and from that amount we get 40 losses, 10 refunds (10 tokens back), 6 doubles (12 tokens back), 4 triples (12 tokens back), and 30 tokens that become various prizes. (Results so far: 30 prizes, 34 more tokens to drop into the machine.) Next round, we get 14 more losses, 3 more refunds (3 tokens back), 2 more doubles (4 tokens back), 1 more triple (3 tokens back), and 10 more prizes. (Results so far: 40 prizes, 10 more tokens to drop into the machine.) Next round, we get 4 losses, 1 refund, maybe 1 double, big maybe on 1 more triple, and 3 prizes. (Now we're up to 43 prizes, with maybe up to 6 more tokens to drop in.) I'd guess that in the end we'll end up with around 45-46 prizes out of the whole thing. So the effect of those double and triple token payouts (at the drop rates I arbitrarily made up and with an excessive loss rate to fight against) is that a 30% chance for any particular spin to be an actual prize turns into a 45% rate for the initial investment being converted into prizes (and the 40% chance per spin at a loss turns into an overall loss of 55%).

Anyway, concerning more ideas for alternate prize options... I'm thinking lockboxes rather than dropping a ton of companion gifts or materials or whatever else directly. Like the crafting boxes that you can get for fleet comms that have some random grade... 6-8(?) and 9-10(?) stuff. I forget what levels of materials they were exactly (and it could be any type of material in those grades, even color crystals). I'm thinking that they create a whole line of random item lockboxes for various sets of crafting materials and companion gifts. Maybe divide the materials into grade 1-4, grade 5-8, and grade 9-12? And divide gifts into grade 1-2, grade 3-4, and grade 5? So that's 6 lockboxes to add to the machine's drop table instead of adding a couple hundred or so different items. (150 items just in gifts alone. 10 types of gifts is 30 different gifts per grade, and there are 5 gift grades.)

In another topic I had also asked "what if they added the "credit boom" and "credit explosion" pack items to the machine as well?" They'd have fairly low odds of course. They'd each be balanced so that the average cost (after getting some of your money back from selling rep items of course) would be higher than the average number of credits spit out by the item so that it's just another partial refund instead of generating new credits. But a huge payout like that would make you feel like you had beaten the system.

On the other hand though, while we're on this lockbox kick, maybe they just make a few new credits lockboxes similar to the slicing ones (minus the chance at picking up a mission discovery as well sometimes). So instead of trying to balance the (I'm kind of guessing the averages here) average payout of 45k credits from a "boom" and the average payout of 90k credits from an explosion against the token cost of 500 or 1000 or 2000 or whatever they end up finalizing it at... Instead they could try to balance in a few boxes with average payouts that look more like 1k or 2.5k or 5k. They wouldn't seem as impressive as the boom or the explosion, but they'd still be a nice surprise to make us kind of forget a little bit just how many credits we've burned on the machine.

Anyway... materials lockboxes, gift lockboxes, and credit lockboxes all used along with the rep items as "filler" prizes (obviously favoring the lower level variants of all of those items)... I wouldn't necessarily remove Jawa scrap from the list, but the materials filler would certainly go a long way towards distracting from the incredibly low drop rates that the scrap has been reduced to. If they can add a couple things to list aside from the rep that tie the machine to its intended theme (something exclusive to those packs, or create a "prize ticket" for the machine to hand out (later machines would each have their own unique prize ticket) and add options to buy certain items from the vendor in the bazaar for some number of prize tickets (alternate payment option for some items currently bought with certificates, or just alternate payment options for items on that vendor in general)), that would be nice. (That prize ticket idea could also be a somewhat common-ish "jackpot" that could be a distraction from the lowered drop rates on the generic cartel certificates.)