Problem here: you’re trying to nudge or shake the ball away/out the outlane, don’t succeed, bob makes contact after the ball registers the switch, rip bonus. Also outlane lazaruses are dope.
It’s gotten even easier now that a new Stern weighs about 100 pounds less then a game built 10 years ago.
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Some way to introduce viscous friction, i.e. the kind of friction where the force increases with higher velocities. Here is an expensive example:
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You don’t need to control the way the rest of the world plays pinball. Don’t do them if you don’t want them done.
Online play is just for fun the same way Pindigo scores are just for fun.
I personally don’t care at all how other people play; but the ability to perform deathsaves does make it more difficult to compare my scores to better players. Are they scoring higher because they’re better at the game, or better at making deathsaves, or both? (I don’t attempt them)
The game can detect a deathsave… single ball in play outlane switch followed by more playfield switches instead of the outhole. How about flagging any game with a save and displaying that high score with an asterisk at the end of it? Put in an audit as well so the op can decide if the tilt is (way) too loose…
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Ruling question about this. Are death saves only penalized if the attempt is successful?
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The new tilt debounce on JP 1.0 makes them more difficult. Change warnings to 1 to make them impossible
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I noticed a premium I just setup at LAX was 750 stock. I like that.
A few DE games give you points for going one
Our league rules prohibit death save attempts. Does not matter if they succeed.
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Now that digital accelerometers are a fraction of the price of just the plumb bob in the tilt mechanism, why are we still using ME devices for tilt? Put an accelerometer in there and “award” negative scores for any “nudging” that’s remotely strong enough to damage a machine. Damage to other people’s equipment is my biggest problem with death saves.
Not trolling here…what is the damage risk of a death save? I’ve never seen it.
I suppose it puts torque on the legs and leg bolts, but so does slide saves and probably small, consistent upward nudges that people do when the ball is in the pops (which happens at a rate of several hundred or even thousands to one, if you’re comparing that against death saves).
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When I try to do it I make sure I do not get too aggressive, but the other night I saw someone do it where they put their foot on the leg of the machine and physically push/kick the machine to do it. I could see that damaging the machine. It was pretty cringe to watch.
The floors.
Very good point. I recommend using some combo of tighter tilt bobs and/or rubber feet on the front.
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No different than any other nudging. That’s up to the person who places the machine.
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I think there is a big difference. You can walk into a bar in Portland and see which games are easy to death save just by the massive divots worn into the floor. Games that are easy to slide do wear the floor too, but the damage isn’t usually as severe.
I’m not against death saves, I do them fairly regularly, but the floor damage is a real thing.
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For myself, I think the biggest competitive reason to stop death saving is to get better at outlane saves.
If I were half as good at death saves I’d probably be twice as good at saves.
At work, we have broken multiple legs. It is from a combination of slide saves and death saves. It is certainly the case that the lock nuts are not kept tight consistently. In one case the leg threads were just stripped and the leg levelers just fell through. In the other case the weld on the leg broke. Both were front legs.
I think tight lock nuts would have prevented this, but that doesn’t always happen.
I can’t find it now, but Keith Johnson has talked about why he didn’t disable the flippers on the upper playfield on TSPP when the ball wasn’t on the upper playfield. It’s been a while, but I believe he said that doing that would open the door for bugs/ malfunctioning switches to disable the flippers when they shouldn’t be disabled. I’m not a programmer, but he made a pretty argument against disabling the flippers.
We’ll know soon enough assuming Escher keeps making videos. Locations don’t want to be known as the place with only one tilt warning.
Funny you should mention that. A location that I play at regularly has the pins close together. Slide saves getting games too close together quickly became a problem. So the op put super grippy feet under the front legs. It worked. Slide saves became nearly impossible without knocking the game off the feet. It also made the games tilt easier. I’m not sure of the physics involved, but it was noticable. Ironically, it seemed to make death saves easier. Most all the death saving players can do one without knocking it off the feet.
Thinking some more, death saves are done on the left side of the apron and most Lazarus balls come from the right side of the apron (on Stern’s anyway). Fix the left side and Lazarus balls are still a thing.
Rather than making the bottom of the apron concave, maybe just angling in the bottom of left side slightly would do it. Minor change. Tightening tilts isn’t the answer because good players can death save with a relatively tight tilt. The plastic apron and two tilt warnings makes it easy for experienced death savers.
Operators would appreciate it. The players doing the death saves are playing the longest games and spending less than other players. Yes, players who are good at death saves are virtually always excellent players to begin with, but death saves just keep them on the game even longer.