Jackpots and Capping Payouts
Understanding Jackpots
There are a quite a few different ways of having a jackpot system that can award a bonus pay to a player. Typically, however, these fall into one of only a few categories:
- Symbol-driven jackpots
- Random jackpots
- Range-driven jackpots
- Feature event jackpots
Symbol-driven jackpots
These types of jackpots are very simple to follow…achieve a particular paying combination on the reels and you’ll win the jackpot. My pet peeve is jackpots of this ilk that force a player to bet max in order to have a chance of winning.
This sprang from the traditional land-based industry and a desire to increase bet patterns amongst players.
However, in the on-line industry you have the beauty of not having to worry about limited floor space and limited player time…on the net you’ve got 24 hour access and if a player wants to low-roll so be it. Why force a player to play a bet they do not want in order to have the chance to win a jackpot?
The main reason for forcing bet parameters on the internet comes back to reset and trigger values of the jackpots themselves. Unlike a randomly triggered jackpot, a symbol-driven jackpot is more difficult to flexibly alter to proportionately increase the trigger rate for a higher bet. It’s still possible to do this, but it requires effectively different reel strips for each bet level, as more of the trigger symbol will need to be added to compensate higher betting players with a higher trigger chance.
In my opinion it’s more effective when forcing a particular bet to still have the chance to win the jackpot on any line. Many games, both land-based and on the net, only allow the jackpot to be won on a certain line. Personally I think that if you can only win on the 20th line you’re just going to end up with 19 times the number of satisfied winners with a bunch of very annoyed players that got it on lines 1 to 19.
Random jackpots
These jackpots have a defined chance to trigger on any given spin, typically (but not always) based on the level of the bet.
For instance, a jackpot may be set to a 1 in 300,000 chance to trigger, based on a bet of $1.
This chance is checked by the RNG after any given paid spin (so at the end of any paid spin, including features that have triggered from that spin).
If the player is betting less it will be proportionately lower, and if they are betting more it will be higher.
Range-based jackpots
Jackpots of this type will always trigger between a defined range.
This range is advertised to the player, such as “will always trigger between $100 and $1,000”.
At the time the jackpot is reset it will determine the precise level, to the cent, that the next jackpot will trigger at.
The player that then contributes the 1c to take the jackpot meter to that defined trigger value will be the one that wins it.
Feature event jackpots
There are an enormous variety of jackpots in the land-based industry that trigger from a feature event, often involving player interaction in the form of pick features and so forth.
Wheels, pyramids, dice, board game features, bingo and number bonuses, card features…you name it, it’s out there.
There has been some translation to the internet and there will undoubtedly be a lot more to come…especially as even the reputable software providers seem to have scant regard for the plethora of patents that cover jackpotting systems in one jurisdiction or another.
Jackpot RTP
So how much of the game RTP tends to go towards the jackpots?
When you’re playing a game that’s meant to be 95% and it has a jackpot, what are you really getting?
A lot of players never see a jackpot, so the last thing you’d like to see is that you’re playing a 90% game and giving 5% to others.
In short it comes down to the software.
My own experience in designing games for the net is that jackpots usually need to be kept to less than 2% of the RTP. More than this and you’re running the risk of killing the majority of players to reward the very few, and really, if you set the trigger rate to a suitable level you can achieve a good game and have a jackpot that’s not out of reach.
As an example, say a random RJ was set to trigger on average once every 100,000 units bet (on average), with a unit of $1, a reset value of $1000 and a 0.25% increment (this last part being the amount of each bet that is sent off to the jackpot meter). Average RTP would therefore be 1% for the reset seed of $1000, for a total RTP of 1.25% As an alternative, say a random RJ was set to trigger on average once every 250,000 $1 units bet (on average), and has a reset value of $1000, with a 0.8% increment. Average RTP would therefore be 0.4% for the reset seed of $1000, for a total RTP of 1.2%
Bets of less than or more than $1 would have a proportionately lower or higher chance to trigger the random. In the first example a test of the RNG would be conducted with a 1 in 100000*(bet versus $1 unit) to see if the RJ was won on a given paid spin (not tested during a free game feature for instance). In the second it would be 1/250000*(bet versus $1 unit)
So someone betting 10c in example 1 would have a 1 million chance of hitting, while someone betting $10 would have a 1 in 10,000 chance of hitting.
No adjustment to these chances should ever be made for the level the RJ is at, as this should never be part of the trigger test. Sometimes it'll rise to great levels, other times it'll go off early.
In some games, particularly those with massive symbol-driven jackpots, you may need to pull an extra percent or two in, but they should be the exception rather than the norm.
This isn’t an issue if the game has a compulsory or optional side bet for the jackpot…but there aren’t a whole lot of those around on the net…yet.
