Playing Pachinko

I’ve always been curious about the game Pachinko which isn’t a huge draw in the US but seems very popular in other areas of the world, particularly Japan:

I wonder how one becomes a Pachinko “professional?” There is a little bit of pinball skill in that players can choose when to let the balls go and hopefully put them on the right track to falling into the holes that increase the credits instead of decrease them, but it’s pretty much out of the player’s hands once the ball is dropped into the chamber.

Up until yesterday when searching through SLexchange I wasn’t aware Pachinko existed in SL. I bought the non-copy version 1.16 of the Pachinko machine for L$750 and decided to demo during our radio show event yesterday. Once rezzed this machine has a nice looking texture backdrop, cool sounds (although some are not original) and it’s required to right click and pay it to insert credits. The configuration notecard has only a few options:

rake - from 0 to 10% to be taken from cashout of credit amounts.
L$ per credit - can be 1 to 1 ratio or higher, like each ball could be worth L$2, 5, 10 or more
max buy-in - the maximum amount a player can deposit into the machine at one time
machine name - whatever you want to show up when the object says something in the channel

The first few plays of the machine had it operate similar to many slot machines found in SL: you put the L$ in and pretty much lose them fairly quickly. Overall I think the odds of slots in SL are much too tight and favor the house, but there are a few exceptions. During our live event one of our group members put in L$20 and hit several Wheel of Fortune spins for 50 credits and then had these disasters started striking giving him even more credits. As we watched, he took the 20 credits to 1,000 and then higher very quickly. I finally asked him to stop playing around 1,600 credits because it seemed to be paying too well. Nothing wrong with a lucky streak, we give away L$ during our events anyway, but the machine as a demo seemed to be malfunctioning. As the credits grew in number, the “disaster” bonus games were generating larger disaster bonuses: 200, 300 and more credits. Considering he only started with 20 credits, this didn’t seem normal. He also was able to hit the 500 on the wheel several times. The highest spots on the wheel are Jackpot (configurable amount), 1000 credits and 500 credits.

(I let him keep the L$1600 or so that he won, BTW)

After the show one of the other VTOR members, JohnnyRS who has been contributing some excellent posts to this blog tested the Pachinko machine with me again. We started with lower amounts L$5, 10 and 20 and worked our way up to L$50 and then L$100. It wasn’t until we put in L$100 that we noticed the numbers were turned more into our favor. Much, much more. Since the owner of these machines can’t tweak any odds and can only change what was mentioned above this made us wonder if there might be some error in code as the number of credits grew larger.

We were able to take 100 credits up to 2500 over a span of about an hour of playing. What a great deal this would be if it wasn’t an error or bug in the code and was intentional. So I suggested rather than to use our test machine we find a real Pachinko machine out there in the world.

We found a vendor location at  Taggart’s Holiday Camp and Pachinko Parlor [SLurl] which is pictured at the top of this post. This had several Pachinko machines with varying amounts. I noticed that v1.16 was for sale and yet those on display were using v1.15. We played these machines and found them to be more balanced — neither of us won anything significant. In fact I lost L$200 or so. This left me wondering if the new version might have changed something. I decided to contact the owner/co-creator of the Pachinko machines (one of three people listed as responsible for creating Pachinko) and explain what happened.

Unfortuantely the owner/co-creator wasn’t online, but here’s the message I left him:

I will update this blog entry once I hear back from the creator(s) of Pachinko but in the meantime, I would be careful rezzing anywhere public v1.16 of Pachinko without running your own tests. v1.15 seems fine but if you see v1.16 something seemed out of balance in our testing. It is possible that we just got really lucky I suppose, but we tested for a couple hours, not a few minutes and were able to get ahead quite easily. This is a great situation for the player if this is intentional, but if it’s unintentional, then some v1.16 pachinko owners could be going into the red fast.

Does this make us professional Pachinko players in SL? Maybe. Somehow I don’t think so.

As for the game itself from a player and non-owner perspective, it’s a nice change of pace from slot machines in SL. You might do a find for “pachinko” or visit Taggart’s place and give this game a try.

Update 10:45am SL time: I spoke with Gigs Taggart and he looked at the code and confirmed there was a bug that impacted the overall payback percentage. He immediately fixed and issued a 1.17. He sent the following message to those in the Pachinko owner group:

Gigs also gave me an extra no-copy version of Pachinko for reporting the bug and shared with me some private overall odds/stats on the Pachinko game. I didn’t get to see any actual code — and didn’t ask to — but from my dealings with him, his speed responding and candor, and looking at the numbers he showed me privately (he asked me not to publish them) gave my confidence in the Pachinko game. We’ll run more of our own independent tests over the next week. Even with the changes Gigs made with v1.17 the odds are still very player-friendly assuming the numbers he showed me are accurate. Give this Pachinko game a shot and tell Gigs that the VTOR blog sent you.