It is certainly not crystal clear, because the rules are - intentionally - vague about this. PAPA/IFPA ruleset, my emphasis:
Any malfunction which provides at least one player with a significant advantage over any other player competing on that machine is known as a beneficial malfunction. Tournament officials shall determine what constitutes a significant advantage.
In this situation, the player legitimately earned the right to have multiple physical balls on the playfield; those balls were not on the playfield because of an erroneous double eject from the trough or anything like that, so the fact that multiple physical balls were in play was NOT a malfunction. Then ONE malfunction happened: a flaw in the software removed the superior scoring opportunity that was supposed to be available to him. That one malfunction is either a positive event or a negative eventā¦ which is it? I would argue that itās a (minor) negative malfunction.
āOh man, my opponent just started multiball, and then the machine unlit all the jackpots! What a lucky SOB he is!ā <ā said no one, ever.
I will say in this particular situation, I was the first tournament official consulted about this ruling, and my interpretation of the IFPAPA rules were the same as @heyrockerās. I called Greg over to make the final call because he was our lead official and has tons more TD experience and software knowledge than I do. Thereās obviously room for debate (thereās always room for debate) but there was no deviation in interpretation or slippery slope arguments occuring between tournament officials on the day of.
I agree with the original ruling. Thereās just no way to know what would have happened had the player gotten back to multiball with both balls still active. For example, letās say during this hypothetical multiball T2 kicks out 2 more balls as per the normal multiball rules. There are now 4 balls on the playfield. Now maybe the game loses track of the number of balls supposed to be in play and ends the ball after only 3 drain. What now? Is this a minor malfunction? Play on?
I agree with the emphasis on getting back to a known game state. Itās not about whether the added balls/loss of multiball is beneficial or not in the short term, but about the possible compounding consequences of an unknown game state down the line. In my mind this is very different than the examples of KM or Gollum which are known and fully coded.
Weāll just have to agree to disagree on this one.
If the opposite happened and a player started multiball, but for some reason no other balls kicked out onto the playfield, but the software continued with multiball rules, you can argue thatās still one āeventā yielding both a negative and positive thing - negative is that multiple balls didnāt kick out, positive is that mutiball rules are properly in play.
The argument then becomes looking at the ultimately state of the machine after the āeventā, and that would be a player getting to play a 1-ball multiball - clearly not something that is allowed.
I would apply that same logic to the negative situation. The player got boned, and ended up in a situation where they had multiple balls on the playfield when the game clearly wasnāt in a known state of multiball, or a specific game rule where multiple balls on the playfield happen outside of multiball rules. Itās not about judging how the player got there IMO (did they get a little boned? really boned? mega boned?). Itās about judging whether that final situation is fine to continue play, and 2 balls in play when the game doesnāt think there should be 2 balls in play isnāt a valid situation to continue play.
Ultimately I will always push to get the game back into a known state, because you are just begging for ācrazy shitā to happen when you allow a game to continue in an unknown state. The behavior of the machine from that point on is completely unpredictable, and you are left having to make judgement calls all the way through as to how much potential benefit is okay, and where that line is ultimately crossed.
Maybe the multiball difficulty doesnāt increase properly, maybe the drop target gets into a state where the game tells it to stay down all the time, maybe the game will just go into end of ball bonus when the ball is sitting in the skull scoop or in the cannon.
As MHS put, the game is clearly broken, so fix it and continue play. Fixing it is putting that extra ball in play back in the trough, making sure it doesnāt go into end of ball bonus when you do it. If it does, then apply Major Malfunction rules to the situation. If it doesnāt, then play on. After the game . . . burn T2 to the ground
Whereas I appreciate what you are trying to do, in this specific circumstance, every single one of these issues is not a valid concern.
2 more balls cannot be kicked out because there are only physically 3 balls in the game. It is not designed to take any more than that.
Games generically end multiballs when there is < 2 balls in play according to trough and other ball lockup counts. We are not talking about hardware malfunctions here. (And still the point about losing mb after 2 balls with 4 on the table is obviously still invalidated anyway because there arenāt 4 balls.)
Games will only end balls in play if the trough and lockup count accounts for all known balls (known balls being installed balls - balls assumed to be stuck/missing for some reason), again assuming no mechanical issue which we are not talking about here.
This in general will never happen on any game used in a tournament. Any Stern Sharkeys-or-later game, and afaik every APPLE+ game (Funhouse and beyond) will end multiball next time a lockup device is touched, or possibly immediately. I honestly do not know what happens in a pre-sharkeys whitestar game.
I donāt believe APPLE allows this to happen. Also any Stern game Monopoly-or-later will not do this either.
Just trying to keep it real here. No need to argue hypotheticals that donāt actually exist. And yes I realize most people probably didnāt realize all this, so consider it a free lesson in internal pinball workings.
An amusing anecdote to lighten up the mood in this thread:
Yesterday was yet another long tourney (4/20 tourney @ Add-A-Ball in Seattle), and almost the exact opposite situation happened to me on lightning. If youāre not aware, lightning has 2 locks that are 2 saucers on the playfield, and they sit in the saucer until you are awarded multiball, but they are rather exposed in their locations on the playfield, and I unintentionally knocked one of the ālockedā balls loose and had a physical 2 ball multiball going while the software was not in the multiball state, except this time the multiball was not awarded by the software in the first place, so it wasnāt āearnedā. The second it happened I almost lost it just out of frustration of having to deal with these events :).
If youāre curious, the ruling was that this was part of the game of lightning, and to play on with both in play. I was able to trap up both balls before asking, but I basically got 1 missed shot with the extra ball before it drained anyways. The TD isnāt as in tune with the official rules, so no idea if thatās the right ruling or not, and donāt really care, just thought I had to share.
What are the odds to have this happen 3 times in 2 days? And to be able to trap up the MB every time to ask in the first time? And my opponent on Lightning was the same opponent I had during the 2nd malfunction on T2 Sunday. I may be getting some tournament game malfunction PTSDā¦
To this point, T2 might not be the best possible example, but there are many machines where if the same thing happened (multiple balls kicked, but otherwise game thinks youāre in regular play) it could constitute a huge advantage, along with the ācanāt lose turnā insurance that multiball normally carries.
When first reading the explanation by @johnnyfive I felt it was an incorrect ruling, but I now agree with it. The gameās declared multiball is over. Yea, verily, it sucks.
Iām not gonna keep pounding this one, even though I disagree with the consensusā¦ Iāll just go get a beer with @keeferā¦
Yeesh. Maybe buy a Powerball (heh) ticket and see what happens.
I was trying to think of games where itād be highly advantageous to be in single-ball rules rather than multiball rules with multiple physical ballsā¦ maybe something like AFM if you wanted to pound saucers. What examples are you thinking of?
Any game where modes are āpausedā and donāt score points during multiball, and the multiball is generally worth less points than the modes, would be a good example. Perhaps Dirty Harry? (arguable) Two balls in play during crank it up for MET would certainly qualify here. Maybe thereās other games where starting the multiball is most of the points, so being able to use 2 balls to start making progress to the next MB would be advantageous over the normal multiball scoring rules.
Iām sure thereās quite a few examples where itās at least not clear that it would not be beneficial to have gotten the malfunction that I did for that gameās multiball.
Iām the TD for every event weāve ever had in CT and play very often in events here in New England. Iāve been on the losing end of a ton of rulings. There is no good answer for most of these.
We encountered some software bugs in Taxi during our last 24 hour battle. Something Iāve never seen documented. Player steps up and locks a ball in the right saucer. With next ball out into play they hit the left ramp and start multiball. They immediately lose the ball coming down right outlane from left ramp multiball start shot. And game should go into single ball play for current player but instead continues on in single ball play as NEXT player. No bonus count nothing. Just starts scoring for next player. They trapped the ball. We had no idea of game state and since the game said it wasnāt there turn we said drain the ball and see what happens next. Their turn was already prematurely ended and they started scoring for the next player. So many things wrong already. When drained it went to 3rd player. Reset game and started over was only logical scenario.
This happened 3 times. 2nd time didnāt change any outcomes so I was never notified at the time. After 3rd time(2nd know time) we pulled it. The following week fixing all the down games after a 24 hour marathon tournament(boy were there a lot) I tried everything in my power to recreate this bug for hours with the glass off. Never again have I ever seen it. Not sure what to chalk it up too? Game fatigue? Legit software bug? Who knows but some one is always on the losing end with bugs like these.
Devilās advocate here, but you do realize in the T2 situation, that is also how the game was designed to behave %100 of the time in the given situation. You are judging the intent of the designer, which is likely correct, but the game was indeed programmed to give the player multiple balls in āsingle ball playā under those circumstances.
Where is it acceptable to judge intent and when is it not?
Based on our experiences with a given game is the situation an expected normal behavior of the game?
For T2 I would say itās not, for KM I would say it is.
One could argue on the software side that there are no such things as bugs and that the exact behavior of the game is always programmer intent, but I believe thatās a worse way to roll with this.
