I would guess random nonsense. It would be surprising if there weren’t a couple of outliers. Maybe the Shadow you could come up with some advantage for player 1 with physical locks and skill shots, but it seems unlikely.
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OMG the thought of possibly discovering a score reel malfunction on a machine 5000 miles away by only looking at match data fills me with so much joy.
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I would say certain games are just more generally popular than others, like for instance I bet you’d see player 1 win on black rose more than player 2 because only someone who likes black rose is gonna pick it and therefore be player 1, and since it’s not an evergreen game like AFM, the person who picked it will usually have a huge rules advantage
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I agree, but in the case of this dataset player order and machine selection is random so that is not a factor here.
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I like to go 1st on EMs for exactly this reason. I find more issues occur on later score reels because they are less used.
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This is exactly the reason we do single player only for the tournaments we run.
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This is also why for Indisc I test all players’ scoring reels for the EMs we use, and advise other TDs to do the same for their events. It’s better to play with all 4 players when possible, but a good TD will make sure that’s viable first and adjust accordingly if not. It does take extra time, which isn’t always available depending on how far in advance of the start of competition the TD has access to the games. At shows where the TDs are relying mostly on donated games, they often don’t get to test and adjust the settings on games until just a few hours before play begins. Those are the situations when it’s most important to do the multi-player testing and if you can’t, make the call for single or two-player games only (if you can’t test all 4 on every game, do you have time to test 1 and 2 or 1 and 3?).
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At INDISC all the machines are running as 1P for at least 8 hours, happily stepping away, and wiping all the contacts in those score reels. And the other 3 sets of reels have sat on zero that whole time. I don’t recall anyone running them through scoring before finals start.
It is good they where tested during setup, but it doesn’t mean they still work as well come finals.
That’s true on days 2 and 3, but on day 1 for Classics Target Match Play, we’re set up for 4 players whenever feasible. If a problem shows up then, we can adapt for days 2 and 3. But the point about retesting prior to finals is a valid one.
Yeah, I was hoping that IFPA17 would have played as multi-player on multi-player EMs, given that they were battle tested the whole week leading up to it.
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Pssshh just have players play one ball at a time, and count to five and add their scores together. Not like there’s any carry over progress in a four player EM anyway!
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