What’s the biggest trophy bug you've encountered in a casino game, and how did you fix it?

My favorite trophy bug was when a player got stuck on “Jackpot Jack” for the “Big Win Hunter” achievement on the “Jackpot Jack” slot. It turned out that the game’s back-end wasn’t registering jackpots over 10,000x because of an obsolete payout cap. We managed this one by manually awarding the achievement via the admin panel and resetting the trophy score for the player.

The silliest bug was a customer of “Fairy Fortune” who won “Free Spins Avoider” awards when they were unable to even land on free spins, due to a broken RNG seed. Sometimes the reels would reset mid-spin which was treated as avoiding free spins. So we got them to try out a test account while we fixed up the RNG and reset their progression using our support ticket system. It’s just something that happens - slot machines and achievements are complicated when you have so many systems talking to each other.

Larger trophy fish included a player stuck in an “Spin 100 Times” achievement repeat cycle – the counter would reset when he cashed out. My solution? Disable cashouts until the achievement could be saved correctly. More unusual fish include a progressive jackpot achievement won on a non-winning spin. We fixed this problem by looking at the RNG log and awarding the achievement ourselves. So, make sure your logs are clean and test any new achievements first in a separate sandbox environment. Trust me, you will thank yourself later.

Once, I encountered a bug in which a slot machine’s win sequence was displaying all its collectible trophies simultaneously – utterly baffling to users. The solution was to modify the software that tracks players’ trophies.

What about niggles? There was one mobile game that required players to double-tap the trophy symbol in order to claim their reward. Users hated it. We introduced more visible screen feedback and improved tap recognition.

This is what I’m talking about when I say report bugs. Sometimes, that will get you around the problem until developers deploy an update.

My response: