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Homeowners association strikes again

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  • Sonic, we have to live in a world where the sad truth exists that not all children have played Sonic 2.
  • "Sir, you are required by the HOA agreement to have a 20-foot replica of either Mario, Samus, or Ecco the Dolphin in your yard.
    Fixed.
  • Sonic, we have to live in a world where the sad truth exists that not all children have played Sonic 2.
    image
    "Sir, you are required by the HOA agreement to have a 20-foot replica of either Mario, Samus, orEcco the Dolphinin your yard.
    Fixed.
    image
  • edited August 2010
    Imagine geektown, with an HOA that brought in community fiber and an arcade.
    Not a concern, here - You can find an real-deal arcade in most big shopping centres, or nearby them. While an Arcade to raise funds for the HOA would be cool, it's not a priority project.
    Post edited by Churba on
  • Imagine geektown, with an HOA that brought in community fiber and an arcade.
    Not a concern, here - You can find an real-deal arcade in most big shopping centres, or nearby them. While an Arcade to raise funds for the HOA would be cool, it's not a priority project.
    Arcades (video arcades that is) exist down under?
  • Arcades (video arcades that is) exist down under?
    I'm pretty sure that's what I just said, but to make it absolutely clear, Yes, Absolutely, in large numbers. There's even a scattering of 24 hour arcades, where you can go in anytime - there's one in the city that I used to kill time in before and after work, when I was working at a bar down on eagle street pier.
  • I'm pretty sure that's what I just said, but to make it absolutely clear, Yes, Absolutely, in large numbers. There's even a scattering of 24 hour arcades, where you can go in anytime - there's one in the city that I used to kill time in before and after work, when I was working at a bar down on eagle street pier.
    What kind of games are popular in those arcades? Are they all crane games, or are they hardcore fighting games and DDR and such?
  • edited August 2010
    What kind of games are popular in those arcades? Are they all crane games, or are they hardcore fighting games and DDR and such?
    Usually a good mix between light-gun, driving, fighting, music games(as a broad category), and some assorted games that don't quite fall under those, and a few "WIN TICKETS!" carnival game sorta machines, but mostly the former four. You'll usually get an air-hockey table or two, as well, but that depends on size.
    Post edited by Churba on
  • Usually a good mix between light-gun, driving, fighting, music games(as a broad category), and some assorted games that don't quite fall under those, and a few "WIN TICKETS!" carnival game sorta machines, but mostly the former four. You'll usually get an air-hockey table or two, as well, but that depends on size.
    Opposite over here. Even at Funspot, the world's biggest arcade, there are mostly WIN TICKETS games.
  • Usually a good mix between light-gun, driving, fighting, music games(as a broad category), and some assorted games that don't quite fall under those, and a few "WIN TICKETS!" carnival game sorta machines, but mostly the former four. You'll usually get an air-hockey table or two, as well, but that depends on size.
    Opposite over here. Even at Funspot, the world's biggest arcade, there are mostly WIN TICKETS games.
    The should just put the ticket dispensers in regular arcade machines. That would pretty much fix everything. Most people suck at Donkey Kong or DDR so they could make just as much cash if not more than the old WIN TICKETS games.
  • The should just put the ticket dispensers in regular arcade machines. That would pretty much fix everything. Most people suck at Donkey Kong or DDR so they could make just as much cash if not more than the old WIN TICKETS games.
    There is one problem with that idea.

    The way the tickets work is that all the ticket games are rigged or random. Even if you play the crane game and win every time (you won't) the amount of money you put into the crane will be more than the cost of whatever prize you get out. If you play something like video poker for tickets, the odds of winning times the ticket payout means you'll pay more for those tickets than whatever prize you can redeem them for is worth.

    However, if you were to put tickets in a game like DDR, Donkey Kong, or Street Fighter, you would have a situation on your hands. Even though the vast majority of people suck ass, and would still be profitable to the arcade, the few people with skill would make the whole operation unprofitable. One guy walks in and plays Donkey Kong for 25 cents. He actually has skill. He sits at the machine for hours. To make it even worse, now you have to give him a big screen TV for 25 cents. That right there blows away all the money you made on crane games.

    The key thing about the ticket games is that they take seconds, not minutes, to play. A round of three songs in DDR takes forever in arcade time. If you play a crane game over and over until you win, you're putting in a quarter for every few stomps of a DDR player. In the time it takes to play one round of Street Fighter, someone could easily put $5 or more into a crane or video poker game. That's why they incentivize those games with tickets.
  • Cap the number of tickets you can get per play?
  • Cap the number of tickets you can get per play?
    People only want to play ticket games if there's a possibility of huge payout, even if the reality is that the payout is usually small or nothing. Think slot machines. You need a gigantic jackpot to trick people into playing, even though most players will make very little money, or actually lose money. If you have a cap on tickets in a skill based game, it's not going to get anyone to play those games who wasn't already going to play those games in the first place. All it's going to do is force you to buy more tchotchkes to give to the real gamers in addition to the ones you give away to everyone else.
  • even if the reality is that the payout is usually small or nothing
    I've always found it's the other way around - the machines pay out three quarters of a shitload of tickets for anything you do, for the most part. It's just that anything you can get with the tickets that isn't some .001 cent tchotchke tat with generic cutesy logos is by having about 80 metric shitloads of tickets. Sure, the machine pays out a hundred fifty tickets a play, but that shitty Sanyo 15 inch TV costs 27,000 tickets. Playstation 2, 15,000 tickets.
  • edited August 2010
    I've always found it's the other way around - the machines pay out three quarters of a shitload of tickets for anything you do, for the most part. It's just that anything you can get with the tickets that isn't some .001 cent tchotchke tat with generic cutesy logos is by having about 80 metric shitloads of tickets. Sure, the machine pays out a hundred fifty tickets a play, but that shitty Sanyo 15 inch TV costs 27,000 tickets. Playstation 2, 15,000 tickets.
    It is next to impossible to get something in a well-run arcade via tickets or crane without putting more into the machine than the prize is worth. Your only real chance of doing this is hitting the highest possible prize on your first shot, getting hundreds or thousands of tickets for just one quarter. In this incredibly rare event, you might be able to get something that's worth a few dollars, like a sack of candy or something.

    It is true that games like skee-ball spit out a few tickets every time you play. What you can get for those tickets is worth a lot less than the 25 cents you put into the game.
    Post edited by Apreche on
  • edited August 2010
    It is next to impossible to get something in a well-run arcade via tickets or crane without putting more into the machine than the prize is worth. Your only real chance of doing this is hitting the highest possible prize on your first shot, getting hundreds or thousands of tickets for just one quarter. In this incredibly rare event, you might be able to get something that's worth a few dollars, like a sack of candy or something.
    You most often get real kiddy games for the ticket machines here, I don't know how it is there - stuff like "Step on the flashing light!"(except without music), and whack-a-mole, skee-ball or basketball. And as I said, Those machines are outnumbered by far in most of the arcades here - They don't make their money that way.

    Instead, they make their money through tokens - You buy a set number of tokens, but most games take two tokens as a credit, and one or two credits per game, except for some of the kiddy games. However, most of the time you end up with some leftover tokens, because the going rate they give you for tokens is often not an even number. So, you either use up those tokens on kiddy games, and get useless tickets, maybe get enough for some novelty toy. You take them home, often, you forget about them. Next time you go to the arcade, you either remember to bring them, or you forget them at home, and have to buy a few more.

    Oh, and of course - They change the tokens every few months, so that if you wait too long to use those tokens, they're useless till by a stroke of luck, they change back to those tokens(as they cycle through) but most people forget about them after finding out the first time that those tokens were useless, and just throw them away, or forget them on a shelf, or in a drawer somewhere.

    On top of that - they try to appeal to teenage gamers and 20-somethings with most of the machines, and they tend to pick very good locations to set up.
    Post edited by Churba on

  • However, if you were to put tickets in a game like DDR, Donkey Kong, or Street Fighter, you would have a situation on your hands. Even though the vast majority of people suck ass, and would still be profitable to the arcade, the few people with skill would make the whole operation unprofitable. One guy walks in and plays Donkey Kong for 25 cents. He actually has skill. He sits at the machine for hours. To make it even worse, now you have to give him a big screen TV for 25 cents. That right there blows away all the money you made on crane games.
    Well I guess they could always rig it. Basically they could have it where no tickets come out until the end and they don't tell you exactly what it is that gives you the tickets. They could just make it so that once you get past a certain point, the amount of tickets you can be given after is greatly lowered. Say you get 10 tickets every level. After you reach a certain point you might only get 1 ticket per level or something like that so that the really skilled person wouldn't be getting all of the tickets unless they started a new game, which they probably wouldn't because they came to just play the game anyway.
  • To make it even worse, now you have to give him a big screen TV for 25 cents.
    The trick is just as the arcades here do - jack the tickets price way up for it, to compensate. Sure, people like Billy Mitchell exist, but maybe a handful of them in any given country, if that - you could easily get away with having some regular games dispense tickets. You think you're good at DDR? Cool. Every time you triple-a a song on hard, you get twenty-five tickets. A Wii is five thousand, five hundred tickets. The ticket design changes every month. Good luck, man. Assuming you play perfectly, every single time, you're doing two hundred and twenty songs before you get that Wii. Three songs a play, that is - rounded up - 74 games, at two dollars a game - That's 148 bucks from the machine, plus the percentage you make on tokens.

    Now, Nobody plays perfectly every time. Say, you're exemplary at DDR, and you get AA rather than AAA on one song per game. You're now playing 99, rounded up, games to get that Wii, 198 dollars plus token percentage. That's damn near the cost of a Wii right there, assuming he played for a little over seventeen hours straight, missing only one game out of every three - because that's how long it would take him, assuming the average song length of about 3.5 minutes.

    On top of that, you have to factor in all the people who are not going to be quite that good, but trying to get the Wii anyway, who are dumping money into the machine to essentially give you free profit, and breaking the streak of that one guy who IS that good, and most likely forcing him to spend more time at the arcade, waiting around for other people to finish, and there's only so many hours in the day.

    Now, say the person this good is a teenager and has to go to school, or has to work, and sleep. He only gets to come in after school (since you don't open till after school has started) and stay for a few hours a day - say, two hours. He's going to be there for - rounded up - nine days, if he has exclusive access to the machine at those times. But, of course, you have other patrons, and he only gets to play the equivalent of an hour, you're up to eighteen days, conceivably, you could make it even more, if you have a popular arcade, say in the middle of the city, or in a busy mall.

    Are you starting to see what I'm getting at? They can afford to make just about whatever game they like to pay out tickets, because you have to be perfect to get the prize. The second you're even just barely off perfect, and your chances of getting that TV are going down exponentially, if the arcade owner is smart enough to run the machines right, and if he isn't, then he's not going to be in business very long.
  • That small amount of tickets isn't going to get anyone to play who wasn't already playing. The people who play DDR because they like DDR don't care if there are tickets or not. The people who want tickets aren't going to play DDR for the chance to win a handful of tickets if they get a perfect. They're going to play games of chance that randomly have high ticket payouts. The cost of installing and integrating ticket dispensers into a game that isn't designed for it, even just for one machine, is going to cost way more time and money than it will ever earn in increased playtime.
  • edited August 2010
    That small amount of tickets isn't going to get anyone to play who wasn't already playing.
    It's purely an example. So, people are not going to play for 50 tickets, give them a hundred. Give them two hundred. Doesn't matter, just jack up the price of the prizes.
    They're going to play games of chance that randomly have high ticket payouts.
    No, they're not, because there are hardly any, if any, games like that, at least around here - because if you are rewarded for an essentially random outcome from a games machine, it's considered gambling in the eyes of the law, pretty much, and thus would ban under-18s from your arcade, which is suddenly subject to a lot of taxing, licensing, and differing insurance laws, along with a lot of extra staff training. And if you're thinking of saying "That's ridiculous" think - What is a slot machine, if not a machine where you are allowed to gamble for prizes on a random or semi-random outcome?
    The cost of installing and integrating ticket dispensers into a game that isn't designed for it, even just for one machine, is going to cost way more time and money than it will ever earn in increased playtime.
    Actually, it's not that much, depending on the machine. For example, if your machine blinks a particular light when you win, just split that light off so that you have a voltage sensor on the same line, when the light powers on, that tells the ticket dispenser to output X number of tickets, for a simple, old-school example. As long as it has an externally detectable win state, even if it's reading a particular pulse from a PCB in the machine - which is the huge majority of machines - you can reasonably easily rig a ticket dispenser to it.
    The main problem is getting the room for a ticket dispenser in there, without having to piss about too much with it, and that's not terribly hard at all, and after that, the major cost is buying the ticket dispenser of the appropriate sort, and the Labor and downtime for installing it.
    Post edited by Churba on
  • edited August 2010
    Top 7 insane homeowners association rules
    What the FUCK? I knew this shit was bad, but got-damn. That is beyond appalling.
    Post edited by Johannes Uglyfred II on
  • edited August 2010
    No, they're not, because there are hardly any, if any, games like that, at least around here - because if you are rewarded for an essentially random outcome from a games machine, it's considered gambling in the eyes of the law, pretty much, and thus would ban under-18s from your arcade, which is suddenly subject to a lot of taxing, licensing, and differing insurance laws, along with a lot of extra staff training. And if you're thinking of saying "That's ridiculous" think - What is a slot machine, if not a machine where you are allowed to gamble for prizes on a random or semi-random outcome?
    Just restart the operation as a geeky styled night club (Like the Chaos Theatre in Scott Pilgrim). That would be AWESOME!
    Post edited by ElJoe0 on
  • My homeowners association actually has the rule where you can't put a for sale sign up in your front lawn. You are supposed to place it in your window. I plan on using the "go fuck yourself" approach when I do eventually sell my house.
  • My homeowners association actually has the rule where you can't put a for sale sign up in your front lawn. You are supposed to place it in your window. I plan on using the "go fuck yourself" approach when I do eventually sell my house.
    You could just put one up in every window.
  • Obviously I think all HOAs should not exist. What is the benefit of forming a group that does nothing but take your money and tell you what you can and can not do on your own property?

    But, given that, we all know the fundamental problem with HOAs are that the people who run them are old people who can stay home all day and have nothing better to do. They have time to care about what their neighbor's house looks like because they have no lives. Only such losers actually have time to go to or care about HOA meetings or join HOA boards. Just look at the HOA where 3600 people were against the mailbox policy. Clearly the HOA board election is a scam.

    The solution is pretty simple. HOAs won't have elected boards anymore. An HOA is a small enough organization that there is no reason it can't be a direct democracy. Also, all voting should be done the HOAs web site. The HOA must start out with no rules whatsoever. To add a rule, they need a majority vote. Abstentions automatically count as no votes. If the entire community really agrees on something, they can get together and create a bylaw. Otherwise, the default that everyone can do as they please on their own property will stand.

    If someone violates a rule, someone can bring up a dispute with the entire community via the web site. The person who is supposedly in violation can post a response. Then in order to deem the person guilty of breaking a rule, you need that same majority vote.

    This still leaves the possibility of someone living in an HOA where the majority of people are jerks. In that case, you deserve it for moving into such a house in the first place. You might say that every home in your area was under some HOA, as is true in many places. In that case, move to another state. Seriously.
  • You deserve it for moving into such a house in the first place. You might say that every home in your area was under some HOA, as is true in many places. In that case, move to another state. Seriously.
  • So a life-sized, buyable, and livable replica of the house from Up was built in Utah. It is being sold off and has an asking price of around $400,000, but when it is sold, the new owners are going to have to repaint the house to live up to the Homeowners Association standards.

    I think I'm going to cry.
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