I feel like the gambling machines are a bit cheaty, I just started my Legacy Island III challenge and within the first 3 days have won over 30k. Am I just having really good luck or are the odds way too high?

Unlike real gambling, the odds are always in the players favor. A lot of the store stuff is cheaty, rather than providing a meaningful, at least semi-deep experience.We'd probably get a lot more fun out of the content if it wasn't throwing money at you.

Yes, they are cheaty. So very cheaty. But there are also a lot of things in the base game and EPs that make it way too easy to earn money and not enough things in the game that take money away. I use a harder bills mod, and I play by the random legacy challenge rules (which severely restrict the ways your sims can make money), and I'm on generation 1 of my legacy with over 100K. Ridiculous. >.<

I guess im just expecting too much realism from a game. Oh well. No more of that for me

I bought Lucky Palms some months ago but only recently tried the casino out when I put it in my current world. My sim hacks the machines and blackjack tables and wins big every time. Her career is pretty much gambling because she can make far more there than she would working a real job. It's way too easy to get filthy rich so I might remove the casino from my world.

This mod might be worth a look if you want less cheaty slot machines. I haven't opened it up and looked at it til now, but I imagine you could tune this to be absolutely disastrous for your sim gamblers if you wanted.

Can't find the actual download link of that blogpost, does anyone have a working link?

It may have been deemed to be outdated if it was released while the game was still being patched, since this thread was from so many years ago.

NRaas Retuner can provide ways to adjust the tuning on slot machines and each gambling table type, for those who wish to pursue some fixes away from the "instant money machine" scenarios that way.

Yeah that's probably the reason, such a shame it wasn't updated though.

I figured Retuner can be used to achieve this, but I'm always a bit cautious of using it unless I know what interactions to tune. I assumed I would have to edit "General>By Tunable XML>Gameplay.Store.Objects>(Gambling object of choice) but when I looked at the Slot Machine, I wasn't sure if I had to just change kWinningOdds or also kBigWinOdds and kJackpotOdds to get an overal decrease in chances. Also the odds are categorized in a list, I assume these are the gambling skill-levels?

Also, thank you for replying so quickly, I've probably said this before but I don't know where the sims 3 community would be without you

Bah, they would all be just fine and their sims would probably have more money between them. But thanks for the kind words.

It does look like those "list" based odds might map onto the Gambling skill. There's also supposed to be a bonus in there someplace for the Lucky trait, although I might be confusing that with playing Lotto (lottery tickets). While there you might want to reduce the skill per minute calculation factor as another complaint about these objects are that the skill gains far too quickly with just casual usage. But the rest doesn't really come with a user manual so you might have to experiment to get the effects you wanted. If your sim, and everyone else in town, never wins at the slots then you have probably gone too far. If nothing seems to have changed much, then not far enough.

What I've been waiting for all these years is for a mod developer to come up with a way to play community Bingo, through which a Role Sim is assigned as the number caller. The players' cards fill at different rates, the excitement mounts, and finally we have a winner of some cash prize or a small kitchen appliance that no one really needs.

Hey thanks for the advice! I forgot to reply, but I fiddled around with the settings and am fairly pleased with the more balanced settings (though I might make them even harder in the future, since it's still on the more forgiving side) Also thanks for the suggestion to lower the skill gain. On the poker/blackjack tables it was already balanced enough, but the slotmachine was extremely overpowered.

Haha a bingo mod would be a blessing for my older sims, gives them something to do. The modder should imo also include relationship loss for sims who win too often as a sign of jealousy. Everyone in the Sunset Valley home for the elderly knows Margret is cheating to complete her Hummels figurine collection

Humph, I'll have you know that I used to play Bingo when I was in college. I found it fun and more relaxing than partying all the time when not studying or working and video games weren't quite there yet (unless you really liked Pong and its siblings). Never won very much, though. Now that I'm much closer to that home for the elders myself, I don't find it engaging because there's not enough movement on the cards to capture my attention. Maybe I'm actually just not old enough yet for the appeal to have returned.