Recreate the thrilling gamble of using eBay by playing the eBay slot machine
Four Winds Casino in New Buffalo, MI, has a giant eBay-themed slot machine. Technabob wanted to give it a spin...
By the time I managed to stumble my way over from the buffet line, the eBay slots were so busy that I didn’t even manage to donate my money to them. ... From what I could tell, they’re those typical nickel slots with tons of perplexing jagged lines which must match up in order to pay the big bucks. Of course, unlike the real eBay, there’s no guarantee that the highest bidder will win anything.
From Techna's shots, it's apparent that they're using their own categories, and various consonants, as the symbols. They got one thing right: buying and selling on eBay is always a game of chance.
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Um ... at eBay, the highest bidder does not "win."
The highest bidder los ... since (s)he was the person who had to pay more for an item than any other person would have had to pay.
Every person who is the final bidder at eBay, has thus, lost, since they were forced to pay the most.
I recently was in Vegas and saw and played one of these things (@ Bill's Saloon).
First of all, it's a brilliant and nefarious design.
Why? It's a "community gaming" system. 5 consoles are linked, and after some number of spins, all 5 consoles (or however many of the 5 that are being actively played) stop and all the "contestants" get to share 10 spins on the giant screen. This is fun. My wife sat down with 4 elderly women and they were screaming at the giant screens. It was fun and highly entertaining.
Next, it's not a penny slot, or even a nickel slot. It's a 50 cent slot. You can only play in multiples of 50 cents, 50/100/150/200/250. Credits are listed in pennies, though.
Now the nefarious bit... They've managed to integrate a timer into the game. You build up the timer by betting more quickly (see how fast you can hit that respin button). The more time you build up on the timer, the higher the multiplier you get. This multiplier is used by each person to multiply the winnings from the community spins to their console total; so if the community spins = 960, and you have a 2x timer, you'll get 1920). With 50 cent bets you can get 2x multipliers, and if you hit the button immediately after a spin, get up to 3x. Larger bets give increased multipliers.
I studied the timer, which maxes out at 40 sec. When you spin, it adds 6 seconds to the timer. So in order to mantain a multiplier of 2x, you need to spin when the timer reaches 34-35 seconds (so you touch 40 seconds). If you wait until the timer drops to 32-33 sec, you don't touch 40 sec and you wont get the 2x multiplier for that spin.
So the thing makes you (want to) spin every 5-6 sec. At 50 cents per spin. So that's 10-12 spins per minute, meaning a spend rate of $5-6 per minute!
So yeah it's entertaining in a group, but it doesn't take long to burn through $20 when you mix slots with a time-based mechanism. Which is too fast for my blood; more fun to play real nickel slots and sip drinks for an hour on that same $20.
-v
Those fiends! Are you saying that in Las Vegas they have machines designed to maximize your expenses when you play an entertaining machine?And, occasionally, you can win some large amount of money (IF you play it enough)? Scandalous!
This is going to put a real crimp in the prostitution in Las Vegas...
Ken
They're not slot machines, they're 'Bandits'. In the olden days they were 'One Armed Bandits'. Now they're just 'Bandits'.
I found some of your comments interesting. I was the Artist for Ebay at IGT and there where a lot of cool features we had to leave out because the server for the five banks couldn't push what we wanted to do... The Star meter is an F'n brilliant idea that The game designer Eric Nelson and I (Marv Wiersch) came up with. One thing you might want to take into consideration when playing is that as long as the meter is still full you can still get into the bonus regardless of whether you have coin in or not...This won't be the last version there are more on the way...
-M
If you are a slot player and loose more than win but like the excitement of a bonus...then ebay is for you. I have never had the fun at any slot machine like I had playing ebay. Slot players you will love it.