Inside Asian Gaming

May 2009 | INSIDE ASIAN GAMING 27 dip’. And just to be safe, we even have special reports. If someone miraculously did everything at the same time, or unplugged the GMU [game monitoring unit] in the middle of a transaction, we would have reports that would point out ‘Hey look, this person did this’, and we would catch the thief just like that,” states Mr Doyle. Offline ticketing is also built in to Bally SDS 11. In the unlikely event that the system goes down, the product provides operators with the ability to print out up to 35 offline tickets per gaming device—enough ticket printing capacity to last most casinos a couple of days. “If a system was down for a couple of days it would be pretty scary. The reason we did it that way though is because we deal with so many different regulatory jurisdictions we had to make the number of offline tickets configurable,” explains Mr Doyle. “By making the offline printing function completely configurable in SDS, if the regulator says‘We only want three tickets printed offline if the systemgoes down’, we can configure it [Bally SDS] appropriately. It will tell the GMU, ‘Print three offline tickets’. After that everything goes into ‘hand pay’. Bally SDS 11 also pays close attention to the needs of the cage and the back office of a casino’s operation. “In the cashiering module [of Bally SDS] we also allow you to redeem offline tickets. What we do is we have certain mathematical hatchingalgorithmstore-calculateaticket.Sowiththisofflinemodule the cashier can actually enter in (even if they’ve lost communication back at the client end) information from the ticket, and it will say whether or not that 18-digit number is a valid number for the dollar value of the ticket, and can validate the other information on the ticket. By doing that we have a reasonable assurance that it’s a legitimate ticket,” says Mr Doyle. In developing Bally SDS 11 the company has been listening closely to the needs of operators on a range of issues including restricted credits. This is where credits are downloaded to a particular slot machine on behalf of a player, but the player then decides he would like to try his luck on a completely different machine. “As we’ve started to roll out in the field our promotional credit features so that operators can award free play credits to customers, we’ve found some casinoswere very concerned that playerswouldgo onto a machine, they [the casino] would download them a hundred dollars in credit and the customer would play a little while, but then they’d think ‘I don’t really like this machine. I don’t want to stay here and finish playing’. “But those are restricted credits, so while we could print out restricted tickets [another feature we have] a lot of people don’t want to do that. So what we have done is we actually generate a feature—and it’s configurable, you can turn it on and off—whereby the customer, if he or she decides they’re going to leave, can pull their card out and the credits go back up into the system and basically repopulate the customer’s account. That customer can then go to another machine and they can start playing that other machine and download the credits again. This way they don’t lose credits they have not yet played,” explains Mr Doyle. “It’s a pretty cool feature that is very advantageous [to operators and players]. We have had a number of [operator] customers turn that feature on and use it, and they’re very excited about it. They really feel it’s giving customers the ability to move from machine to machine even though at one machine they may have downloaded at one particular machine more credits than they are likely to use.” Bally Technologies Screenshots of Bally Technologies’ Slot Data System 11 off occurs, a message is sent to the system to cancel the ability to print out a jackpot slip. The fraud protection that’s built in is two-way communication tomake sure that nobody [no employee] can‘double