Genuinely off-topic question. Friend was at a pub in Aberdeen at the weekend and got into the It's-A-Quiz / Itbox machines for the first time in years. He swore the questions are now noticeably harder than the early-2000s machines used to be. Has anyone else noticed? Is this confirmation bias or did the operators legitimately tighten the difficulty curve?
Pub quiz machines in Scotland — still as rigged as ever?
Was a software guy in this space briefly. The interesting bit is that the question DIFFICULTY isn't what changed most — it's the timing pressure on the bonus rounds. The window shrank by about 2 seconds across the board around 2020.
Honestly the same psychology applies online — MadCasino's video poker tables advertise 99.5% RTP but session-to-session it feels stingy, same as the pub machine.
The 2-second timing cut @HighlandHouseEdge mentioned is spot on — I was working the floor when those updates rolled out in late 2020. What most punters don't realise is the machines also started tracking individual player patterns more aggressively around the same time. If you're hitting bonus rounds consistently, the difficulty ramp kicks in faster now.
The Aberdeen machines your mate hit are likely running the newer Electrocoin firmware that weights the question pools differently based on your session length. First 20 minutes you get the standard mix, but after that it pulls from the 'experienced player' question set which has about 15% more obscure sports trivia and fewer gimme entertainment questions.
The tracking patterns @dundeedealer mentioned explains so much about my last few sessions at the Red Lion in Stirling. I'd been hitting the Monopoly machine pretty consistently for weeks — nothing massive, but steady £15-20 wins on the community chest rounds. Then suddenly around Christmas the machine seemed to 'learn' my timing and started cutting me off mid-bonus more often.
What's mad is I switched to the Deal or No Deal machine next to it and immediately started hitting again. Same pub, same evening, but the tracking hadn't caught up yet. Makes you wonder if bouncing between different machines in the same venue actually helps, or if they're all networked together now.