JM Bonus Collect/Hold Weirdness

Games
1

Hopefully this has been discussed somewhere, but my searches haven’t turned up anything…

I was playing JM for the Quarantopia tournament, trying to get a big score with spinner millions. My ball 2 I had around 4bil bonus from the spinner and hold bonus lit, then ball 3 I drained with 8bil total. It awarded a few hundred million in random points and my hold bonus of 4 billion, and then my total was 17 billion? Doesn’t add up.

Here’s a clip:
https://clips.twitch.tv/HelpfulStupidMangoDoritosChip

Exact numbers:
Score when draining on ball 3: 8.339b
Bonus from that ball: 58m (before 3x multiplier)
Held bonus from last ball: 4.439b
Displayed total bonus: 4.613b (consistent with held bonus + (ball bonus x 3)
Final score: 17.392b (difference from original score: 9.053b)

What exactly is going on here?

2

Held bonus on this game is multiplied by the bonus multiplier (up to 5x). This has been known to break the game in tournament strategy. :stuck_out_tongue:

3

That doesn’t seem to line up… I got 9 billion added to my score for my bonus, and my bonus multiplier was 3x. My held bonus was 4.4 bil, x3 would be 13+ billion, which should have put me in the 20s if it was multiplied?

4

If you had around 8bil (and change), and it was held on ball three, you effectively get 2x that bonus. So if it was around 8.5B, then your total would be 17B.

Note: I haven’t watched the video.

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5

Paging @cayle. He is my sensai on all quirks of Johnny Mnemonic.

6

I added the exact numbers to the post so you don’t need to watch the video…

Earlier in the stream, I got my spinner millions on ball 3, and held my bonus, and I didn’t get any hold bonus at all, which the rulesheet online seems to confirm… https://clips.twitch.tv/TrappedSuperPhoneEagleEye
Here I was on ball 3, had 1.8b from spinner millions that ball, 2x multiplier, hold bonus lit. I drain with 3.8b, I get ~3.8b from my 1.8b spinner x2, end with 7.6b. No additional score from the hold bonus

In the original clip I posted, I held my bonus on ball 2, and this was the bonus calculation for ball 3, so I should have got nothing from the ball 3 hold bonus, unless there’s a bug where on ball 3 it uses your previous ball’s held bonus instead of updating it to match your bonus from the current ball, effectively awarding my bonus held from ball 2 twice, but only my ball 3 bonus once?

7

There’s an actual bug where it awards the bonus twice. Once when it displays “previous bonus” and again when it said “total bonus”. That’s why hold bonus is so busted

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8

So every hold bonus is awarded twice, no matter what?

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9

Yes this is the issue. It’s worth a ridiculous number of points. Basically any held bonus is awarded twice, and potentially a third time if you get the two different Bonus Hold options.

As an aside, if you get Bonus Hold on ball 3, you get zilch.

10

*cracks knuckles *

Yeah people pretty much have it right.

When the game Displayes “Held bonus XX,XXX,XXX,XXX points” it is actually awarding that to your score. And then when it says “Total bonus YY,YYY,YYY,YYY” it awards that to your score. So in essence you can get your held bonus twice on a bonus collect.

Multipliers do NOT multiply your hold, only the bonus and spinner millions accrued on the current ball.

So that means…

If on ball 1, you get 1B in spinner millions, and hold bonus twice. And 4x bonus. And then purposefully drain all 3 balls, you get:

Ball 1 Drain Bonus: 1Bx4 = 4B

Ball 2 Drain Bonus: 4B Hold, 4B total = 8B

AND

If you get collect bonus from the grid on ball 3 you get
Collect Bonus: 4B Hold, 4B total = 8B

Ball 3 Drain Bonus: 4B Hold, 4B total = 8B

4+8+8+8 = 28 BILLION.

Effectively 28X

Which means, each spin of the spinner was worth 280M points.

nice.

Yes, you can stack a hold bonus on a hold bonus on ball 1 so that you hold all the way to ball 3.

Protip:

Collect bonus on the grid. Then play PowerDown to eject all your balls off the grid, then re-collect bonus on the same grid position as they have not been scrambled.

32X

image

Mark Steinman at papa: “How’d you get 8+B on JM!?!? that spinner is swapped for a single switch!”

14 Likes
11

So if you collect two hold bonuses on ball 1, one hold bonus will stay to be used on ball 2?

12

I think I need to make a slight correction: using award bonus on the grid seems to remove your hold bonus from end of ball. Or it removes something because I remember running into something weird with this at a tournament once

13

It was this game: https://youtu.be/o3dOMnReL8Q?t=5021

1 Like
14

Wow! Yup that was the one! Notice how I stacked 2 Hold.m Bonuses on ball one, and did the glitch twice on ball 2: once with Award Bonus and once when draining. Because I used the hold bonus in the award bonus, it took away one of them so come ball 3 I no longer carried any hold bonus into it.

15

Fascinating. Ha!

16

Based on this JM quirky code logic, would it also be true that if you had a crap game, and didn’t do The Thing ™ with Spinner Millions until your last ball, that the ONLY way to cash in Hold Bonus would be to: (1) Get Hold Bonus, and (2) get Collect Bonus during that same last ball? Is this correct?
(because Hold Bonus earned during your last ball doesn’t do anything for your EOB bonus)

17

Does playing the regular multiball scramble the code? I guess it must, otherwise there’s a lot more. I’ve noticed the scrambling is not a true randomization of all 9 awards, it feels like if you know where 1 or 2 things are, you can determine them all.

18

It’s definitely confusing… I think the award bonus award is only useful if you DON’T have hold bonus. In other words, if you’re one ball 1 then it is useful and doesn’t take away anything but it also doesn’t give you the glitch of double awarding the hold bonus. It’s a “cant have cake and eat it too” situation. You can only benefit from the “previous bonus xxx total bonus yyy” bug once per Hold Bonus award, the Award Bonus won’t give you more of them.

EDIT: see Cayle’s post, you can still profit on this award in a ball 3 situation

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19

It burns one of your hold bonus’s. Remember, hold bonus carries your bonus to the next ball.

If you use collect bonus (burning a hold bonus), hold bonus will still award at end of ball* (if it was carried from the previous ball). However, if you only had 1 hold bonus remaining, using collect bonus will prevent bonus from carrying to next ball.

Using your collect bonus(s) on ball 3 is a free-for-all, because there is no ball 4 to mess up your hold bonus on.

(unless you are a some sort of 4-ball-game savage)

edit - Its been so long since I tried this, (say, a collect on ball 2), now I’m second guessing myself. To be safe, never collect bonus anywhere but ball3.

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20

You can not get points from hold bonus in the way you describe. Bonus has to be earned in a ball before so that it can be held to the current ball to collect.

Best you can do going into ball 3 if you have a bad game going is 4x multiplied regular bonus / Spinner millions. You can get it at EOB bonus, and collect it on the grid at that point.

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