and with glove disabled then you have deal with all kinds of stuff even ball search during video mode that can drain and end the ball with flippers off.
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I dub this exploit “Yasnooza”.
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IV.1.f
Due to the complex and imperfect nature of pinball machines, rare and / or unusual scoring situations may arise that are the unintended consequences of programming oversights, errors, mechanical issues, or wiring issues. If a Tournament Director deems a player is taking advantage of an unexpected scoring situation or an obscure “programming bug”, the Tournament Director reserves the right to warn the player in question to not abuse the situation further, end the game in progress at the current score, award a score of zero, or ask the player to restart the game. The determination of whether a player is taking advantage of a software or scoring issue and the subsequent penalty, if any, is left up to the discretion of the Tournament Director and will be based on the particulars of the specific situation.
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Out of my curiosity then what was the intent? Isn’t it an infinite loop you can just repeat? Or sometimes it wouldn’t reset the timer so in theory you could only do it X amount of times?
Well now I’m extra intrigued…didn’t realize this was already accounted for in the PAPA/IFPA rules so it sounds like that exploit was not a legal play? TD discretion of course.
Right, it’s TD discretion.
I don’t know which version of the rules introduced it, but this rule has been on the books at least as far back as Pinburgh 2017, where it was applied on a game of CFTBL. Ah, the same discussion shows it was added to the PAPIFPA rules in March 2017.
What was the intent?
To score points, and win the match. Plan was to do the thing until I had a healthy buffer over the other player(s) scores (say 2B over including held bonus), and then stop doing the thing and continue with other types of play. This strat normally does not break the game, and you can stop any time by NOT skillfully dropping the ball back in the VUK.
Now, its up to interpretation weather or not you believe that strat requires any skill, but there is player input that has to take place for each scoring event, and there is risk on each scoring event that if you do not do it correctly the ball will be able to enter the greater playfield and drain. Now is that risk high? No. Does it exist? Yes.
Does the mentioned IFPA rule apply? I don’t think so - but its a completely subjective rule that is %100 up to TD interpretation. (note I’m pretty familiar with this rule, as it was originally written in response to me trolling Mark over a fake Iron Man bug pre-papa 
).
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I did this a couple of times when I had a JM years ago, but actually stopped doing it bc I didn’t want to break the game. Sometimes I still drop the ball back in the VUK to start a mode when I don’t want to lock a ball.
Didn’t Yakuza bug out and end though during this? I saw the total for Yakuza it pop up at one point (2.1b) and I thought someone said it was only paying 1M per VUK afterwards, believe it was when the weird integer thing occurred and caused the glove timer to go to 255. At 1M per that’d be a thousand VUKs per billion, would take 6-8 hours (4-6 seconds of moving the glove per each VUK thing) to reach the necessary threshold at that point. Hardcore.
Yakuza was active the whole time - but it did get weird there at the end.
It was paying ~50M per hand drop for the first “clean” 50 drops I did. Once the magnet took a crap (unintentional), and the code bugged and the timer rolled to 255 seconds (unintentional) not sure what it was paying. (That’s when I flagged a problem). It was clear though that Yakuza was still going however.
1M would be super hardcore indeed, and I don’t think I would have felt that to be reasonable. But at ~50M, and 160-200 hand drops for a win I’m game. that’s about 15 mins of game time if it had not broken.
@District82 I’m curious about how the magnet broke. Could it be repaired or did it need to be replaced?
and what if the TD is playing same game?
What if one of dev’s of the game is playing in the event?? (then having them make an call runs into integrity issues or even transparency issues)
Can’t have them say it’s not working right and then say well due to the NDA I can’t go deeper.
Backup TDs should always be used for these situations.
Devs playing doesn’t matter. What cayle did was something i can almost guarantee the devs of the game knew nothing about. If it really matters to you as the TD then simply don’t use their games if you can help it.
well devs playing in an newer game?
can the TD ask one who is part of that game if something odd is happening about what the game is doing?
Can they speak up and say something and in the that case on there own?
I may maybe want to move to an VOID game in full or play on
just to be safe from an integrity / transparency stand point.
Now maybe in an very likely thing like an 255 rollover or something that an TD can make the call on there own
NOW an pre event list of things is an differnt thing as long as it made known to all players before as well.
so let’s say you can ramp out or say skill shoot valid playfield for an long time to over come being way behind. How is that not skill and not makeing progress?
What is the limit of a TD to control your game strategy??
I do have one thing that may work on one game to keep rolling it over and over. Due an bug but you need to make shots to make it happen.
Thanks for the response brother, I was just more curious about the theory behind it. I can see both sides on if it’s the right or wrong play. But I would agree if it was done to intentionally break and void a game, I would rule that as unjust competition.
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I have to assume this would be explicitly disallowed where possible, but variation I’ve found possible on a few BSDs in the wild is to “nudge” free the mist ball if it’s on the left, and mist isn’t going. If done when the ball in play is draining, but hasn’t yet hit the trough, you can continue single ball play on the now freed mist ball. On one hand I suspect this is a mechanical issue with the machines in question, but on the other I’ve seen it possible enough that I usually give it a shot in non-competitive play.
Both of these cases are explicitly used as examples in the rules now.
On the TD discretion / integrity question: TDs ultimately can do whatever they want. If you don’t trust a TD, or believe their motives are something other than putting on the best and most fair event possible, I recommend just not attending their events. Vote with your feet.
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Yessir, always. What I do is designate a backup TD to make a ruling if it involves a game I’m playing in. And then designate a third just in case we are playing each other!
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