Walking away from a machine because you won is not that common in pinball. It’s one of the things I like about pingolf. In one player games, you always lose…ball drains at some point and your game is over. In competitive match play, it’s much more common that you lose or walk off plunge than it is that you come from behind on your final ball to take the lead and can walk away.
Yeah, multiball is fun…but hitting a shot and being able to walk away a winner is pretty rare - which makes it really satisfying. Sure, trot around the bases by playing my multiball, but the goal here was to hit the homer before my opponent.
Would love to know the kind of times you’re getting for each objective Ian. The more data points the better as we’re blindly entering some uncharted territory with this.
The modes challenge is definitely a tentative on that list. I am concerned with making sure we find a way where players can’t time out or intentionally drain to make progress on this challenge. I’m not familiar enough with GB to know the best settings required for what we’re trying to do.
As for ball savers . . . they are CHEATING, so no, they won’t be turned on
Agree with Josh here. Multiball start is good for objective goals for all the reasons stated, plus the really key “no save state” reason in pinball. At worst you want goals that require 2 shots or fewer following a drain to match the progress on the previous ball. Any more decreases the synchronization across runs and introduces other factors like quick rebooting to catch up. I don’t really want to deal with a discussion about what is and isn’t cheating with tilting and reboots in a competition like this. Better to set goals in which both of those things would be useless.
Also, Will games be set to 3 or 10 balls? Will extra balls be on? Extra balls, while safe, often add lengthy unskippable cutscenes.
Games will be set to 3 balls. Originally the ‘plan’ was 10 balls, but I kind of liked the drama on the Dead_Flip proof of concept when a player was faced with almost hitting an objective and then is forced to start over after all 3 balls are gone. It reminded me of those Survivor challenges where you have to build up some stack that has to reach a certain height, and nobody is ever out of the game because the whole stack can crash at anytime forcing that player to have to start over.
Extra balls will be disabled, typical tournament mode settings will be installed.
But it’s an important discussion if this is going to be a legit series. Those types of rules can’t be made on the fly. Tilting is part of pinball. If you’re on ball 3 and still have a long way to go to reach your objective, I think it would be a fascinating concept of strategy to tilt out the 3rd ball (within reason) to start on a new game towards your objective. I don’t think restarting a new game on a modern Stern would be something to worry about too much. It takes too long, but it should be allowed if the player chooses to go that route.
One of my favorite walk offs in pinball was Jim Belsito on Aerosmith at pinmasters this year. Walk this way. Ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp… walk away. Pretty amazing.
way back in the olden days (before overhead cameras, tutorials, pod casts, and pros would actually come from out of state for the RMPS), Jim had a pretty sweet “walk off” in the finals against @sk8ball on Big Buck Hunter. He trailed by 5 or 6 million (ish) and was contemplating bird MB vs Elk Mb etc and I somewhat jokingly mentioned that “Moose on the loose” would catch that score with “only” {some absurd number 12 or 13?} consecutive hits on the Moose ramp. Jim walked up on ball 3. Started MOTL, and hit about 12 or 13 Moose ramps in a row to win the RMPS over Keith! #Mooseito’ed
There is a setting you can turn on (it’s off by default) that requires modes to actually be completed before allowing you to advance to the next mode. If you time out a mode with this setting enabled you have to relight modes via slimer and hit the mode start shot to get back into the mode you timed out (progress within the mode is remembered I think). Turning on this setting would eliminate the possibility of any timeout strategy (although it takes pretty long to time out modes so I’m not sure how viable of a strat it would be anyway).
The only reason you’d want to intentionally drain while a mode is running is if you were about to run out of time; you’d start your next ball with the mode still running and the timer would be reset as if you had just started the mode (which is probably be quicker than allowing the mode to timeout since you’d have to go through slimer to get back in). This doesn’t seem like a problematic exploit to me and could make for some interesting risk/reward decisions~
Mode timers pause on GB after a couple seconds of not flipping (in default settings), so there’s definite incentive to make your shots to finish the mode as quickly as possible.
I guess we won’t be seeing a lot of plunge-dominant EM’s in Heads-Up Pinball anytime soon.
I think having Aerosmith’s physical locks ON is a good idea. Plunging is a skill in pinball, and particularly tough to do so when you’re having to skillfully plunge fast enough to defeat the auto-plunger – and especially in this case, where going for the medium plunge will cost you precious time if you miss. Keep the physical locks!
