What I learned in a week messing around with MGM's fake online slots
/On last week’s episode of the Manifesto, I spoke with Justin Vacula of the Hurdy Gurdy Travel Podcast about a suite of browser and mobile apps you can use to accumulate (I hesitate to say “earn”) a loyalty currency that can be redeemed for free nights, food and drink credits, or slot play at MGM casinos and entertainment companies in Las Vegas, Atlantic City, and elsewhere.
It was an incredibly informative discussion but I knew from the outset that Justin is something of a “power user” of these MGM products, so I wanted to get a sense of how easy it is in practice to scale these apps up from scratch. So I did!
The three easily-automated MGM fake slot products
For simplicity’s sake, there are three of these products of real interest:
myVEGAS Slots, a Facebook app
myVEGAS Slots, a mobile app for iPhone and Android
my KONAMI Slots, a unified app that works across Facebook, iPhone, and Android.
Confused yet? You should be, because it’s very confusing. The only thing you need to take away at this point is that these three products have two different currencies:
each of the three products allows you to accumulate and spend in-game “chips,” which are not synced across the three products;
and each of the three products allows you to accumulate “Loyalty Points,” which are synced across all three products, and are the currency you actually want to accumulate for real-world reward redemptions.
The reason I stress this is because you can have all three products running simultaneously, and your Loyalty Points, the ones you actually want to accumulate for eventual redemption, will not appear to sync in real time. But once you move to a different screen in any of the three products, your Loyalty Points will update to reflect those you’ve earned in the other products.
This is just a simple software design decision, but if you don’t know it in advance, I guarantee you will be concerned that your Loyalty Points aren’t being counted properly. They are, at least in my experience.
Scaling up each product is fairly time-consuming
The first and foremost obstacle to scaling up these products enough to be useful is the first 3-4 hours, since each product also assigns you a “level,” which you increase through the amount of time spent in the product. These “levels” have no other in-product function, except that they require you to periodically interact with the product in order to dismiss the notification that you have “leveled up.” You don’t have to do it all at once, but there’s no way around periodically checking in to dismiss these notifications until you get to a high enough level that the notifications become relatively infrequent.
Now, remember those worthless “chips” I mentioned above? They do have one important in-product function: the more of them you have, the faster you can speed-run the leveling-up process, and there’s a Facebook group where they post links for free chips every day. You want to click on all the “myVEGAS Facebook,” “Mobile” and “Konami” links. You can click on them all in the same browser window and all the “chips” will populate to the correct products (i.e., “Facebook” chips will go to the Facebook app, “Mobile” chips will go to your “myVEGAS Slots” mobile app, “Konami” chips will go to your “my Konami” app, even if you open them in a desktop browser).
I don’t mind the excess time I spent on it since I was doing research for this post, but if you’re interested in starting from scratch, my recommendation would be to simply accumulate 30-50 million free chips through those links for a month or so, and then allocate an afternoon to leveling up all your products so you can start automating the process.
Earning rewards isn’t “fun” but it’s not painful
Once you’ve wasted a few hours unlocking all the stupid features of each product, the entire ecosystem basically takes 2-3 minutes a day to “automate,” as long as you’re disciplined. That morning routine for me is:
open the Myvegasadvisor Facebook group and claim all the free “chips.”
open the myVEGAS Slots Facebook app and turn on autospin.
open the my Konami mobile app and turn on autospin.
open the myVEGAS Slots mobile app and turn on autospin.
What do I mean by “disciplined?” Well, it only takes 2-3 minutes a day if you don’t check on it. If you check on it, it’s going to take more time, and the more you check on it, the more time it’s going to take. But if you are able to commit to not checking on it, ever, then you don’t have to do anything else.
“Coin-in” is the only mechanism that matters
As I said above, Justin is a power user and I don’t doubt his knowledge of the mechanics of these products. But I do disagree with one part of his strategy for playing these games: he recommends betting the minimum in order to preserve your chip balance as long as possible. I recommend betting the maximum in order to both reduce your time in-game and maximum your Loyalty Point earning, since larger “bets” earn Loyalty Points more quickly. Each strategy has pros and cons, but since these games are not “fun” my goal is to maximize the Loyalty Points I earn per second of interaction I have with each product.
Since talking to Justin last week, I’ve accumulated about 48,000 of the “Loyalty Points” you can redeem for real-world rewards. As we discussed on the episode, a full set of rewards at the Borgata in Atlantic City costs 115,000 Loyalty Points, and can only be redeemed roughly once per quarter, so once you’ve “leveled up” your accounts there’s no point in spending more time than you have to for the rewards you want to redeem.
Rewards at MGM properties in Las Vegas seem to be somewhat more expensive and somewhat more restrictive, but if you’re going to Vegas anyway, there’s no reason not to tack on some free treats, if you can earn them easily enough.
BlueStacks is a very cool program
Folks in the travel hacking community have been talking about BlueStacks for a while since there were circumstances in which using it could lower the cost of liquidating certain prepaid debit cards, but I never paid it much attention, simply because I didn’t particularly need new liquidation channels. Justin finally got me off my butt and I installed BlueStacks in order to run the myVEGAS Mobile and My Konami apps on my desktop instead of tying up my phone with useless spinning dials.
And it’s great! As a 90’s kid I remember emulators as being fairly kludgy attempts to replicate decades-old hardware in order to play Nintendo games. But BlueStacks appears able to emulate up-to-date Android phone hardware on a (now fairly old) MacBook. And I’m here for it.
Conclusion
The MGM suite of fake slots apps is not for everyone. In fact, it’s for virtually no one! But if you’re the kind of person who pops over to Atlantic City or Las Vegas once a quarter or so, I don’t see any earthly reason not to season your account in advance and spend a few minutes each morning racking up some free dining and gambling credits to spend when you get there.
