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We have these:
Every single "door" (position at a cabinet where one player can play) is fitted with one, all 70-some-odd. It's pretty simple: You put money on a card using the kiosks, or you go to the registers, give us the money and we do it for you. You swipe the card through the slot, it debits a credit off your card and coins up the game.
You'd be surprised how many people can't figure this out. It doesn't help that they're kinda picky in how you swipe -- way too many kids run the card through so slow the head can't pick up the waves in the magstripe, so it doesn't respond, then they complain the game is "broken"... Or worse, they swipe a whole bunch of times, and fail to notice that more than a few went through, play the game ONCE, and then walk away with eight credits still on the machine. You can bet your ass they'll get irate about the $3-$8 "stolen" from their card.
It gets worse though. There's a lot of games where the token is directly involved in gameplay. For instance, Wonder Wheel, where a belt launches the token you just stuck in at a wheel, and if it goes through a scoring hole you get tickets. Taking tokens out of the picture is kinda impossible, no? Here's Embed's solution: You put in your tokens and play, and when you're done, you swipe your card to get your tickets. This way we can dispense paper tickets or "e-tickets" (where they go into electron-land on the server) based on the customer playing.
So, naturally, people show up, try to put their money in the change machine, bitch when it doesn't work, so I or someone else explains the card system to them. They then go over to the kiosks, get a card, and are swiping the card at the coin action game, wondering why it's "not starting". At this point we have to explain to them that that particular game needs tokens to play, as you have to aim the tokens at the wheel or whatever such. So they go over to the change machine, now quite rightly ticked that such a simple play has so damned many steps, bring back tokens, play.... and bitch that they didn't get any tickets. Ugggggggghhhhhh...... I'm thankful no smartass kids have figured out that you can swipe an e-tickets card at a machine someone's playing at and steal all their tickets without them noticing or realizing what's going on. There's literally NO WAY to track that.
This experience with Embed has taught me one thing: Card systems are NOT for the customer, they're to make the operator's life easier at the expense of the customer's experience. They talk about customer convenience in all their sales pitches, but it's bunk, all of it. And I won't go into the 80-hour workweeks I did to install all the damned swipers...
Every single "door" (position at a cabinet where one player can play) is fitted with one, all 70-some-odd. It's pretty simple: You put money on a card using the kiosks, or you go to the registers, give us the money and we do it for you. You swipe the card through the slot, it debits a credit off your card and coins up the game.
You'd be surprised how many people can't figure this out. It doesn't help that they're kinda picky in how you swipe -- way too many kids run the card through so slow the head can't pick up the waves in the magstripe, so it doesn't respond, then they complain the game is "broken"... Or worse, they swipe a whole bunch of times, and fail to notice that more than a few went through, play the game ONCE, and then walk away with eight credits still on the machine. You can bet your ass they'll get irate about the $3-$8 "stolen" from their card.
It gets worse though. There's a lot of games where the token is directly involved in gameplay. For instance, Wonder Wheel, where a belt launches the token you just stuck in at a wheel, and if it goes through a scoring hole you get tickets. Taking tokens out of the picture is kinda impossible, no? Here's Embed's solution: You put in your tokens and play, and when you're done, you swipe your card to get your tickets. This way we can dispense paper tickets or "e-tickets" (where they go into electron-land on the server) based on the customer playing.
So, naturally, people show up, try to put their money in the change machine, bitch when it doesn't work, so I or someone else explains the card system to them. They then go over to the kiosks, get a card, and are swiping the card at the coin action game, wondering why it's "not starting". At this point we have to explain to them that that particular game needs tokens to play, as you have to aim the tokens at the wheel or whatever such. So they go over to the change machine, now quite rightly ticked that such a simple play has so damned many steps, bring back tokens, play.... and bitch that they didn't get any tickets. Ugggggggghhhhhh...... I'm thankful no smartass kids have figured out that you can swipe an e-tickets card at a machine someone's playing at and steal all their tickets without them noticing or realizing what's going on. There's literally NO WAY to track that.
This experience with Embed has taught me one thing: Card systems are NOT for the customer, they're to make the operator's life easier at the expense of the customer's experience. They talk about customer convenience in all their sales pitches, but it's bunk, all of it. And I won't go into the 80-hour workweeks I did to install all the damned swipers...
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