Hurricane as tournament game

Scs coming up. Location has hurricane. Any opinions on this game being included in the tournament would be appreciated.

I know the jp value carries over player to player. Also the palace letters might carry over player to player. Is there any way to adjust this in the settings? Is this a game that can be worked fairly into a tournament?

Even if you correct the carry-over and random awards… if the flippers are strong, players will have the chance to play multiple times and get dialed in for some lengthy ramp looping sessions.

I wouldn’t recommend for SCS format.

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I would not use this game. Put it this way: for Pinburgh we had the choice of using Hurricane or Police Force, and picked Police Force.

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FWIW, this location has used Hurricane in a recent tournament and the matches didn’t last any longer than others of the same era.

I can see not using it for competitive imbalance reasons if they’re not able to be corrected, but the playing time on this particular example has been a non-issue.

Edit: And some of the players in the aforementioned tournament are in the SCS field, so it’s a reasonable sample size.

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Ok! Other than the repetitive play there is no major reason to exclude the game. Random awards are of pretty seriously high value and the jackpot carries over from player to player … in that case it’s still about as good as Police Force :wink:

At the least, do what you can to minimize the variance on jackpots. I don’t know what options there are, but a common tactic on all those jackpot-carry games is to maximize or minimize the growth of the jackpot, so it either stays close to a base or grows to a cap as fast as possible.

Pin-Bot is sitting right next to it. Shoot for 20 games worth of solar value! I’ll choose to go first, please. :wink:

You can’t adjust the jackpot min or max, or have it reset on Hurricane. What is possible is setting Palace letters and clown lights to build up separately from player to player, or just reset at the beginning of the game.

We should also reset the solar value before the event begins, and set it to increase by the smallest increment possible. Can we figure out a reason that Nip-It is a bad tourney game now? :sweat_smile:

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Nip-It was somehow played in the 1950s, so it defies the laws of space and time.

https://qph.is.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-0026a96245c685b6fb19b76bb640359d?convert_to_webp=true

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Nip It is a fantastic tournament game!

Don’t talk bad about Nip-It, or Steve will sign up for an account just to defend it.

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OK, I know a LOT about the exact issues with Hurricane because we’ve had one for a long time and use it for league whenever I host.

  • The game does have a tournament mode. It is horribly broken for multiplayer games, but actually works for single player games.
  • In single player, players will always start with PALACE default (usually PAL, but settable) and no parts of the clown face. The jackpot will stay at 5M and never go up.
  • Mystery award still random.
  • In multiplayer games, it almost seems like it’s doing the right thing, but it doesn’t.
  • What should happen: Each player starts with no clown and PAL (or whatever) and keeps their own copy.
  • What actually happens: Each player starts ball 1 with no clown and PAL. After ball 1, everyone shares PALACE and Clown faces. Oooops.

Setting the game for Player Palace and Player Clown Face actually works. However, this behavior is overridden by the broken tournament mode. Therefore, I felt like the best decision was to use the normal settings, which means the Jackpot will go up (up to 15-16M).

You could mitigate the jackpot impact a fair amount by starting everyone at PALAC. That would ensure it generally gets hit once each game each player. Hopefully it doesn’t rise too much to get out of control in some other group.

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