Saturday, March 30, 2013

MyVegas - Real Rewards - Really Worth It

Facebook games are notorious time wasters. I'm sure everybody reading this (which may be all of 2 people) has 20+ games that they are hiding on Facebook because they are tired of the spam and don't want to be bothered by it. I just checked and I have 74 hidden games. Of course this is because every single one of these games do nothing really for us other than help us waste time with the off-chance of them being a bit of fun. But there is also the chance that they could become too addictive and you not only lose time, but maybe you even lose money because you end up buying into it for some reason. In the end there are no tangible returns.

MyVegas seems to be the exception to this rule. I didn't really believe it when I first heard about it, but you really do get real life returns for it that are quite nice.

My girlfriend and I started playing the game back in late October 2012. It started out a bit slow as the game was pretty new, but it's surprisingly become easier and easier to get real prizes. Since we began playing we're already seen Cirque du Soleil: Zarkana at the Aria and Cirque du Soleil: O at the Bellagio. We currently have tickets to go see The Beatles: Love tonight and we just got tickets for Cirque du Soleil: KA for some other time in the future to our liking. After all of that, we still have plenty of Loyalty Points (I'll get to that in a minute) to purchase at least 2 more shows of that value or quite a few more of lesser value.

So, it's free. They must give us the leftovers that nobody wants. Nope, they don't give you the "cheap" seats. In fact, you aren't allowed to get the "cheap" seats, even if you want them. For all of the shows through MyVegas, you're told up front that you only get the Premium seats. So for these 4 shows that we'll be seeing, had we paid full price, we would be out close to $1500.00. Not including the tacked on fees that they have which are also waived for us.

How does it work?

I'll be honest, the game starts out pretty slow.  You don't have many chips to play with and you don't have that many ways to get them.  You start out with a few thousand chips.  The only thing these chips are used for are for playing the slot machine games within MyVegas.  But you need to play the games in order to get more experience and more loyalty points.  I'll explain more about these two items shortly.

The simple version is that you use what chips you have to play the slot machines.  In return you will get more experience and loyalty points for each spin.  Once you run out of chips you are unable to play any longer until you get more chips.

Finished Las Vegas Strip
So how do you get more chips?  Back to the Monte Carlo.  As I said before, at first you will only have one casino.  But with this one casino that you have built you are able to get more chips (or maybe loyalty points) every 2 hours.  It's not exactly ideal to have to check every 2 hours to get these chips and eventually you really won't care about it too much.  To make it more worth while you need to build more casinos.  In order to do so, you need to play the slots.  While playing the slots, one of the pictures that you can roll is the letter "V".  You collect these to build parts of the casinos until you've finished all of the parts and finally create another casino.  Each casino you create tends to give a bit more chips and every few jump the time up by 2 hours for refreshing when you can get more chips from them.  The first few are every 2 hours, then the next few are every 3, then the next 2 or 3 are every 6 hours and then the final one is every 8 hours.  The amount you get from them is somewhat random, but the Monte Carlo gives you about 100-300 normally while the MGM Grand gives 2000-5000 normally.

Great spin with great bonuses.
One of the other ways to get more chips is the daily spin.  Every day (actually about every 22 hours) you are able to do your daily spin that can give you a certain amount of chips.  Then whatever you spin is multiplied by a few different factors to increase the amount you can receive.  First you get a bonus for consecutive days you've done your spin.  Keep it up and you'll get a bonus 300%.  You also get a bonus for how many friends you have playing the game.  And then you also get a bonus % every spin just for liking the MyVegas page.

There are a few other ways to get more chips.  The more friends you have playing the game, the more you can give to them and they can give back in return.  Only once daily per friend, but it adds up.  MyVegas also posts about once a day in your feed some free chips.  Anywhere from 500 to 2000 at a time.  This is another reason to like the MyVegas page.  You can also get more chips in emails from MyVegas and also being signed up for MLife.  MLife is the card you get for all of the MGM owned casinos.  Which are all of the casinos involved with MyVegas.

Experience and Loyalty Points

Experience is something used is many many video games to show some type of progression in the game.  That's basically what it is for MyVegas too.  You gain experience every single time you bet.  You bet 60 chips, you get 60 experience.  If you bet 30,000 chips, you receive 30,000 experience.  And you definitely want experience.  Well, you want levels.  But you need more experience for each level.  Levels will open up more games for you.  This is nice so you don't get bored playing the same game forever.  Levels will allow you to build the other casinos.  Each casino has a certain level requirement to start building them.  Every level you get gives you bonus chips and bonus loyalty points.  The higher levels give even more of each of these.  I'm currently - and have been for a while now - getting 1000 loyalty points for every single level.

But in the end, what you are really working towards are Loyalty Points.  Loyalty Points (LP) are what you use to purchase the real world goods.  At first it might sound like a lot of work to get the amount of LP you need to get the item(s) you want.  To keep things simple I'm going to base this on if your spins are roughly 1000-1500 chips each.  That tends to be the nominal amount to spin any way.  But when spinning that amount, just about every 4 spins you get an additional 10 LP.  Doesn't sound like much, but when you add in all of the other ways that you can get LP, it builds up quickly.

I've already stated a few ways to get LP, but just to be thorough I will once again say what they all are.

1 - Just keep spinning.  Spinning will constantly add small amounts of LP to your total.
2 - Gain levels.  At first it's not much, but eventually every level gives you an additional 1000 LP.
3 - Check your hotels.  All hotels have a chance of receiving chips or LP each time.
4 - Share with friends.  Friends playing the game can share small amounts of chips and LP once daily.

Rewards

This is probably just easier if I show you some samples by way of screenshots.






So that should give you a good idea of what types of rewards are available and how much they cost.  There are obviously a lot more than what is just shown here, but you'll have to start playing the game if you want to see what they all are.  Not to mention that they are constantly adding (sometimes subtracting) rewards to the list.

Again, it may sound like quite a bit of work, but it really doesn't take too much time.  And if you are already playing games on Facebook, why not play one that has actual rewards that are free?