Let me share my situation: I've been playing on Stake for about 3-4 years. I'm currently Platinum IV, with around 500,000 total bets. I should mention that I'm not a fan of simple spins, so except for a few exceptions, 90% of those bets are bonus buys, meaning I purchase bonus features.
Here's where my journey with Stake begins, and everything I'll discuss below is not a complaint but rather an attempt to understand your situation and determine if this is just a streak of bad luck or if it's entirely normal, and in that case, if RTP is indeed a complete scam as the title suggests.
My gameplay generally revolves around three games that I enjoy:
Gates of Olympus
Wanted Dead or Alive
Gates of Heavens
And a few other random games that don't really matter much in the equation I'm going to discuss.
The distribution of my bonuses probably occurred as follows: 200,000-250,000 bonuses between Gates of Olympus and Gates of Heavens, regardless of the bet amount—bonuses of $100, $50, $20, $10, $5, $2.5
For Wanted, maybe around 25,000 to 30,000 bonuses (30/60/120), also regardless of the bet amount.
Now, let's look at the facts:
I have over 300,000 bonuses bought.
I've had 3 or 4 max wins on Gates of Olympus.
I've had 0 max wins on Gates of Heavens.
I've had 0 max wins on Wanted.
And here's where someone might say, "What do you expect, a max win every day? Don't be a hater," but that's not the point—keep reading.
Getting a max win on Gates of Olympus implies a 50x of the base bet you make (the base bet being the bonus in question, not what they tell you is the base bet, because you're really betting 100 times the original bet), and in the case of Wanted, it's 65 times the original bet.
With this situation explained, I have some questions:
What are the real chances of not getting at least 10/20/30/40/50 times a 65x or more of your bet in a simple spin? It's practically impossible, if not impossible (since any bonus, no matter how bad, usually pays 10-20 times your bet—I dare say the number is probably in the hundreds if not thousands).
How long does a losing streak last? There's something fundamental here—many people told me to change slots, but isn't it supposed to be unnecessary to do that? You may have more or less luck in other spins, but the point is that I like to play on those 3-4 slots, not on others.
How realistic is RTP? Because if the point is that I keep playing the same base bet indefinitely, it's supposed to be that between the total money won-lost, I should have at least a total equivalent to 95/96/97% of all my money spent on that slot, even without getting max wins and even if I loss the money. That is to say, some bonuses will pay 0.8, others will pay 1.2, and when you do the overall count—however, this year, I could say that except for one max win from a horrible bet that paid $500, all bonuses or 95% of the bonuses paid 0.10 or 0.20 of the buy-in. Therefore, the system seems somewhat unbelievable to me unless, magically, in the next 300,000 bets, I receive 50 consecutive max wins, which we all know won't happen.
Well, that's all for now. Thanks for your time, and please share your experiences. Again, this isn't a complaint, but if there's a real suggestion I'd like to make, it would be that they should implement AI to understand how people play. In my case, the casino is not only unprofitable, as it happens to anyone else, but also the average wager is only 2 or 3 times the total deposit, which sucks, especially for bonuses where you have to wager hundreds of millions of dollars, when in dice, 1% would be 20-30 times the deposit. Just a clarification: I never complained about the money or how much I've lost on Stake. That's not the point of this message, so please avoid those kinds of comments.