Game of Thrones will have the Coin Door Ball Save adjustment REMOVED from the setting menu.
Ultimately though with the interlock disabled you won’t ever need to worry about trapped balls going into the drain because the flippers won’t be disabled. You’ll be able to open the coin door and grab the ball while the player keep any balls trapped on their flipper (or pulled out of the game and placed back on the appropriate flipper when you’re ready to button the game back up).
If you are playing alone at home and don’t want to take a advantage of a stuck ball in multiball, then you have to treat it like a WPC-95 game. Dump the ball into a VUK somewhere and open the door and jump into the test menu. This will stop the ball from kicking out of the VUK and you’ll be able to unstick the ball and continue about your business.
I completely understand why they did it, but the coin door ball saver was handy for phone calls in the middle of long balls playing at home. It would be nice if they could come up with some way to quickly ‘pause’ the game. A flipper hold software setting set to off by default maybe? How does that work on that one TZ ROM? Do you have to open the coin door while cradling? With the switch completely removed from the coin door, I’m not sure how else you could do it though. Cradle ball, push tourney button?
I’m dying to see the top players time out WiC all day in a high stakes tourney. The timer pause would be more effective if the easy to hit from either flipper center ramp didn’t result in a easily cradled ball. Expo Star Trek part II
Mute & Pause (if enabled on the home ROM) works if you are holding a flipper button and then press the BUY IN cabinet button. All music and sounds are silenced, all timers stop, and the flipper you were holding remains raised even if the flipper button is released (presumably there’s a ball(s) on that flipper). The game will remain in this state for (I think) 15 minutes or until you press BUY IN again to resume the game. Awesome feature for home use.
Modern games could implement this, if they wanted to, by allowing a quick tap on the Start button while a flipper is held to accomplish the same thing (with an appropriate operator adjustment enabled, of course).
I would like to comment on this as I just figured this out on my GOT Pro. I’m running 1.26, and right now, at the start of any ball, the ball save doesn’t start to time down until you hit any roll over, opto, or the dragon shot. You get three single target hits before it starts. I’ve been using this to get a head start on locks, LOL targets, or a couple quick hits to the dragon. Not sure there is much of an exploit there. I would say just a smart strategy to use competitively.
This probably relates to what’s become my biggest pet peeve: post-lock PF validation. If you lock a ball during WiC (or any time a timer is running, for that matter), the timer freezes until PF validation. A quick short plunge post-lock will effectively give you a free shot, with all timers paused.
I really wish there were no post-lock pf validation (add maybe a hard-coded or an adjustable delay before starting timers?).
Tell that to the dude yelling ‘How the f#-? did you drain the ball 18 times and get it back?!’ at me last week. This kinda ties back into the theme of recent Stern games rewarding mediocre persistence over skill with the short plunges out the wazoo.
As a mediocre player with a touch of OCD, I abuse the hell out of this stuff, and in low level tournaments, it is far more effective than it should be.
Did you explain to them how you were doing it? I would. Everyone can do the same strategy until the code is changed or the game isn’t used. If the game allows for endless short plunges, so be it. If your opponent doesn’t know about it, that not your fault. If they take the time to learn, they should only get burned by it once.