It WAS disallowed due to machine abuse (I believe slamming the ball into the side of that ramp caused broken weldments on those ramps), but in the unification of the IFPA/PAPA ruleset that we worked through back in 2013, this became ‘not a stuck ball’ per the updated stuck ball rules verbiage:
“In situations where a ball is trapped in a way that it can be released through player action other than shaking or bumping – for example, a ball at rest underneath a flipper or any other mechanism which the player controls – this is not deemed to be a stuck ball. Balls trapped in this fashion during multiball modes are not generally considered to be a rules violation, although the ruling will depend on the exact machine and situation.”
Reading back through old emails, it was decided that we would leave this up to the TD’s to individually mandate, if they were interested in protecting their Shadow game from such abuse. By default IFPAPA rules however it’s allowed.
I remember telling Neil Shatz the hipping trick the year PAPA NY had Tommy in the qualifying bank. He went ahead and did it but was told by officials he couldn’t do that anymore,
Though, the magnet breaking I hadn’t seen happen before (even with 10B+ worth of points). Nor had I seen the code crap out and roll over to 255 seconds. Was unfortunate and not intended that the game broke at D82 glpo.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ).
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.
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