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Casino games

QuizzicalQuizzical Member LegendaryPosts: 25,499
in Phantasy Star Online 2
Some items are obtained only from casino coins, and as best as I can tell, you have a limited starting pool of casino coins.  The casino gives you a little from talking to Allan for some quests the first time, and then you get some more from quests to try various games in the casino.  But you end up with a starting pool of around 1000 or 1500 coins, and in order to get items that cost 20000 casino coins, you're going to have to win an awful lot.

The house always wins, right?  I mean, that seems to be the operating principle of real-life casinos.  They have to spend a lot of money to build facilities and hire employees, and then still make a profit from gamblers losing so much money as to cover all of their expenses and more.  But not in PSO2.  They've modified the games such that the house mostly loses.  I find it interesting both that they did it and how they did it.

Three of the casino games in PSO2 are heavily derivative of real-life casino games.  Rappy slots is obviously based on slot machines, li li roulette is obviously based on roulette, and black nyack is obviously based on blackjack.  But rather than the odds being a little against you, they modify all three games such that the odds are in your favor.

There are two other casino games in PSO2.  Mesetan shooter is a skill-based game where a decent player will tend to win more than the cost of playing.  Arkuma slots is weird and stupid, but also rigged to tend to let you win.  The key point to understand if you want to play arkuma slots is that you can press escape to leave with your winnings at any time, including after you draw falz arms but before you choose a ship.  That is the only circumstance in which you should ever cash out during a game.



Slot machines are easy to adjust the payouts on the basis of which matches give how large of payouts.  Unlike roulette and blackjack, there aren't fairly standard rules of slot machines.  Rappy slots could thus set the payout to whatever they want.  You can do a lot of probability computations under the assumption of various probability distributions of outcomes, but the different icons aren't all equally likely, and I'm pretty certain that they aren't independent.  Most of the time, your expected winnings seem to be about the same as the cost of playing.

However, if you manage to get a line of rappies five times (not necessarily consecutively), then on the fifth time, it will bring up a timing thing where you have to manually choose to stop the slot on a wild symbol.  It's not really that hard to time, and I suspect that it's mostly there to combat macroing.  If you time it right, the slot machine goes into "PSE Burst Chance Mode", and the center slot will be fixed as a wild that will match anything for the next five spins.  Naturally, this greatly increases your odds of getting matches, so the expected payouts during this mode are much greater than the cost of playing.

Furthermore, if you get a line of three wilds, the slot machine goes into "PSE Burst Mode", in which for the next five spins, wilds have a much larger chance than normal of appearing, and any wild that does appear will not reroll until PSE Burst Mode ends.  Having three or four or five wilds fixed on your board by the end of that greatly increases your chances of matches.  This can easily net you hundreds of coins.

Comments

  • QuizzicalQuizzical Member LegendaryPosts: 25,499
    Roulette also has a pretty standard form.  Normally, you have 36 slots, numbered 1-36, and the payout of betting on any one of them is 36 times what you bet.  You can bet on even/odd, red/black, or various other combinations of slots, but the expected payout of most such bets assuming that the ball lands in one of the 1-36 slots is the same as your bet.  In real casinos, the problem is that those aren't the only slots.  There are two others, so your expected winnings for any bet is 36/38 of what you bet.

    Li li roulette does something similar, with 15 main slots, covering every possible combination of 5 numbers and 3 colors.  Payouts for any particular bet are set such that your expected winnings are exactly the cost of betting provided that the wheel stops on one of the 15 main slots.  And then there's also a crash slot, and if the wheel stops there, you lose, no matter what your bet is.  So that would make the expected winnings 15/16 of your bet, or slightly less than real-life roulette.

    And then they modified this in two ways to tilt the odds in favor of the players.  One is the "big big" slot, which is double width so that it's effectively two slots.  If the wheel stops there, you don't win anything directly, but there will be three extra spins for three extra chances of winning without having to put more money into the system.  The other is the chance symbol.  After bets are over, two of the main 15 slots will be chosen as chance slots, and if the wheel stops there, in addition to the normal payout, there will be an extra spin where absolutely any bet could win, and without having to put more money in.  Well, usually it's two chance symbols; occasionally it's only one, and once I saw four.

    With two chance lights and the big big slot, the expected number of extra spins is 8/18.  The expected payout on each spin is only 15/18 of what you bet, but an average of 26/18 spins means that your expected winnings are 65/54 of what you bet, or a little over 20% more than you bet.

    Except that, on those extra spins, the crash and big big slots are replaced by colored rappy slots.  If one of the extra spins lands there, then any single slot bet of that color wins.  That is, if it lands on a blue rappy, then blue 1 wins, as does blue 2, or blue 3, and so forth.  Just betting on the color blue does not win, however.  This means that a single slot bet has a 2/18 chance of winning on an extra spin, not 1/18, as a blue 3 bet could win by landing on either the blue 3 slot or the blue rappy slot.  If you bet on a single slot, you'll probably lose, but the potential winnings are large enough that your expected payout is about 85/54 ~ 1.574 times your bet.

    The single slot bets thus have a much higher expected winnings that color or number bets.  The optimal strategy to play li li roulette is thus to bet on two single slots every time, as the game allows you to play up to two bets, and never do the color or number bets.  But whatever you do, the house always loses.
  • QuizzicalQuizzical Member LegendaryPosts: 25,499
    Blackjack also has pretty standard rules, though there are a few variations on it.  The basic idea is that everyone starts with two cards.  You can see both of your own cards, but for everyone else, one card is face up and one face down.  In most cases, you're only competing against the AI dealer and not other players at the same table.  You can then keep drawing cards until you decide to stop.  Your goal is to get as many points as you can without going over 21.  Aces can be worth either 1 or 11, face cards are worth 10, and number cards are worth the number on the card.

    After all players have stopped, the dealer does the same thing, drawing extra cards until he stops.  The dealer must draw if his current total is 16 or lower, and must stay if his total is 17 or higher.

    If you go over 21, then you "bust", which means that you lose.  If the dealer goes bust, then you win unless you also went bust.  If both you and the dealer go bust, you still lose, which is the key mechanic that allows casinos to make money off of blackjack.  Apart from going bust, whoever has the higher total wins.  If you win, you get back double what you bet, for a net gain of the amount that you bet.  If both you and the dealer have the same total, it's a "push", and you get back your bet.

    In black nyack, there is no surrender, no insurance, and no splitting, which changes the rules a little from standard blackjack.  You can double down, which is to say, after seeing your first two cards and the dealer's first card, double the amount of your bet, at the expense of having to draw exactly one additional card and stop.  This doubles your losses if you lose, but doubles your winnings if you win, including any bonuses.

    Blackjack is heavily luck-based for a single hand, but in the long run, much more a game of skill.  Even so, while the skilled player will win about 99% as much as he bets, a less skilled player will win less, such as 95% or 92% of what he bets.  So black nyack had to modify those rules to favor the player.  One way that this is done is that the dealer is an idiot and will occasionally hit on a hand of 17-20, which usually causes the dealer to go bust.  That alone is probably enough to make black nyack slightly favor the skilled player.

    But of course they did a lot more than that, mostly by granting larger bonuses for winning in certain cases.  A good black nyack player will probably lose more hands than he wins, but the bonuses are large enough to win more coins than he loses.  Standard blackjack has a blackjack bonus, where if you get a blackjack and the dealer doesn't, your net winnings are 1.5 times what you bet.  Black nyack gives a black nyack bonus of 3 times what you bet if you win, in addition to your normal winnings.  Thus, a 50 coin bet returns 250 coins, for a net win of 200 coins, or 4 times what you bet.  Furthermore, any 21 point hand is a black nyack, regardless of whether or not it only uses two cards.

    In addition, if you draw five cards without going bust, that's a 5 card hand, regardless of the total.  A 5 card hand beats a black nyack, and gives a five card bonus of 5 times your bet if you win.  Winning with a 5 card hand thus gets you net winnings of 6 times your bet.  Thus, while you'll tend to lose more hands than you win, the bonuses from a black nyack or 5 card hand are large enough that you'll tend to win more coins than you lose.

    This also changes the strategy significantly in favor of drawing more cards.  For example, if you're sitting on 17 with four cards, drawing a fifth card would give you a small chance of a five card hand, which nets you 6 times your bet.  That's usually worth the risk, as even though you'll probably bust, the expected payout from a five card hand is larger than even a guaranteed win without any bonuses.

    Another mechanic unique to black nyack is special cards, which you might think of as being like jokers.  They're initially worth 0 points, but whenever someone gets a special card, he rolls one die.  For a player, it will be 0, 1, or 2, with each of those outcomes equally likely.  For the dealer, it is 0, 2, or 4.  The roll of the die increases all special cards in that round by that number, including those of other players or the dealer.  Special cards are always dealt face up, even if they would otherwise be face down, but can be dealt by the extra cards when someone hits.  Even after you stay, if someone else subsequently draws a special card, it can increase change the value of special cards in your hand, and that can cause you to bust.

    A winning hand that contains a special card will pay out a bonus equal to the amount that you bet.  With two special cards, the bonus will be three times your bet.  If you get three special cards without going bust, that is a 3 SP hand, and that beats all other hands, including black nyack and five cards.  It also pays out a bonus of 50 times your bet.  To get the bonus with one or two special cards, you have to also win the hand.

    The final special mechanic of black nyack is the pursuit bonus.  If there are multiple players at a table, the game will sometimes declare that a round is a pursuit bonus round.  The player with the highest winning hand that round earns either 6 times his bet or 300 casino coins; they'll be the same if you bet 50, which is the only way I've seen it.  This is in addition to other winnings.  If no players win, then no one gets the pursuit bonus.

    Thus, the way that payouts in black nyack work is that there are several large bonuses available.  If you win a little under half of your hands outside of the bonuses, but get a big bonus of several times your normal bet on one round out of every 10 or so, then the bonuses can mean that you gain back on average something like 120% or 130% of the amount that you bet.  That's how black nyack is built to favor the player.
  • bcbullybcbully Member EpicPosts: 11,843
    If the odds are not listed, AND varifiable 100% of the time. It's a scam. 
  • QuizzicalQuizzical Member LegendaryPosts: 25,499
    bcbully said:
    If the odds are not listed, AND varifiable 100% of the time. It's a scam. 
    I'm pretty sure that you have no clue what this thread is about.  It's definitely not a scam.
    maskedweasel
  • laseritlaserit Member LegendaryPosts: 7,591
    I'm more concerned about security

    How easy would it be for a minor to participate? The Government here is addicted to online Casino's. All you see are their commercials and shit plastered everywhere.

    "Be water my friend" - Bruce Lee

  • bcbullybcbully Member EpicPosts: 11,843
    Quizzical said:
    bcbully said:
    If the odds are not listed, AND varifiable 100% of the time. It's a scam. 
    I'm pretty sure that you have no clue what this thread is about.  It's definitely not a scam.
    I apologize after reading 90% of the post I seemed like you had a problem with the game and the way gambling for items worked.

    I see you enjoy it. Great.
  • BLNXBLNX Member UncommonPosts: 275
    Fornabdis said:
    I always love to take part in the casinos' discussion. I was the owner of the casino in Thailand that I closed recently 2 years before. When I was living in Canada I loved to go <smelly girl face> and You can say It was my way of entertaining myself and I believe that casinos are the best way for entertainment.
    Casino in Thailand huh? And a low wage casino, not even trying to hide where they get the money.

    On topic, I always had fun at the PSO casino. Not too easy, not too hard, and it was a fun little get away when I was grinding hard. Plus a fair amount of Easter eggs in the zone, and the fortune telling drink is kind of funny.

    I won't get too into detail as @Quizzical did a great job, all I'll mention is I got so many casino card from events and stuff that I never really needed to play lol
    In the King's Court, I choose to be the Jester.
  • MaxWalterMaxWalter Newbie CommonPosts: 1
    Thanks for sharing your thoughts, and feel free to share more anytime! Happy gaming!
  • ScotScot Member LegendaryPosts: 24,423
    This is the adbots favorite thread by Quizzical. :D
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