Fish Tales was especially terrible with this too. I did scorekeeping at Free Play Florida’s pinball tourney and it was agonizing waiting, I think we eventually told people to take a cell phone picture of the score so we could verify.
Fortunately there were issues with that particular FT so it wasn’t played too often after 1 day…
Sorry for the delay… getting a video up is a bit involved, as I still need to make a youtube or twitch account, get a camera, get it rigged and actually figure out how to capture pinball gameplay properly. Or maybe I can just lure @chuckwurt up… 
Recent nice weather hasn’t helped thing either, but I’ll get a vid soon!
Adding Party Zone to the “observe for exploitable/against IFPAPA rules gameplay” list for Party Saver stalling. Not that most people will do it anyways, but if you need 5M to win why not trap up and wait for the Captain to kill the party’s vibe and become a hero?
I’m not familiar with that PZ rule, but if it’s “earn 5M completion bonus if the mode ends without draining”, to my eye, trapping up in that situation would be “making progress toward a game goal” and therefore legit under PAPA/IFPA rules.
“Earn 5M by waiting for something to happen for a few minutes (potentially jittering the flipper to continue a timer), then shoot the request saucer.”
It’s a stalling technique and it would get you in trouble at IFPA/PAPA - it was discussed at a Pinburgh game test and the ruling would be “intentional stalling.”
B-b-b-b-but waiting out 80 seconds’ of Quill’s Quest cause I wanted to play Immolation Initiative worked on location. 
Sidenote: it did work.
How is this any different than timing out a mode on any other game, then shooting some other lucrative shot?
Timing out a mode is making active progress towards another feature of the game. Waiting around for something akin to an idle animation is making zero progress towards anything regarding the current game.
Timing out a mode is rejecting an award that you received with the knowledge you’re passing up on temporary benefits for a short time (minute/90 seconds generally at most).
Stalling for a feature is having nothing and waiting for the award to happen instead of playing constructive pinball. While this is/can be acceptable in the short term (waiting for the letters to cycle on Solar Fire/Time Fantasy, waiting for a strobing shot, etc), the PZ example falls into the “minutes of zero play” category and can clog up HERB lines and drastically slow down match play tournaments if abused.
So is this a time issue then? Say the 5M thing on Party Zone (I’m not familiar with it, sorry) happened after 30 seconds of inactivity, instead of minutes. Would that be OK then? 30 seconds is equal to or less than many modes.
This situation feels quite subjective. It’s in the realm of opinion as to how long is acceptable to wait, what constitutes acceptable risk/reward, etc. For example, say I’m playing Baywatch and I’ve just started Chopper Rescue and that was my 5th mode, so Earthquake will be lit after Chopper Rescue is finished. One could argue that starting that mode is an “award” but anyone with any sense will avoid intentionally shooting stand-up death shots and will instead trap up, time out for whatever incidental points you get for starting the mode, and then go for Earthquake. Qualifying Earthquake is the real award here, I just need to dump a useless mode to be able to play it.
Yeah, it’s a really subjective field but anecdotally the Party Saver tends to happen minutes into a ball. I’m all for stalling out things (I’ve trapped up my fair share of 11th modes/EMP Attacks on Dialed In in particular), but the Party Saver bonus is leaning more towards the “potentially too long” end of the spectrum more times than not.
The blacklist suggestion for suspicious gameplay came to be mostly from the outcome of “you’d be yellow carded for doing this at Pinburgh” when discussing the phenomenon.
I understand where you’re coming from. Even at Pinburgh though, unless you have an official at every game, it’s never going to be better than one person’s word against another’s, except finals of course.
I tend to favor “play the game as it lies” to avoid subjective calls, but I know that’s not always possible.
Just call a TD over to ask for a ruling. By the time the TD gets there enough time will have passed for you to have earned those points. You can’t be blamed for delay of game while waiting for a ruling 
Just love that philosophy!
Yep! And that’s the philosophy behind mentioning the “questionable behavior” games - pinball should be able to self-regulate itself without us stepping in for more than stuck balls and technical bugs. If there’s some strategy or chain of events on a game that someone says is “undesirable behavior” or there’s some silly exploit, I would like to consider the situation for the tournament and player base before including it in the tournament.
Is Who Dunnit banned? I remember playing a Pinburgh match with a bug in which the elevator bank didn’t go up.
The v1.0 ROM supposedly does not have this bug. v1.0 was used at INDISC 2018 without incident.
BSD you can cycle thru the screens by pressing the flipper buttons