“Any beneficial malfunction which provides one or more players with a significant scoring or strategic advantage in a way that is not part of normal gameplay will void the score of the affected player(s), unless all immediately-affected players and tournament officials can agree on a suitable adjustment of the score or other elimination of the advantage.”
As a TD, id have the player start a new game and learn from it by disabling the feature in the future.
As a player id offer to do the same. I dont want to beat someone and have an asterisk next to the match.
If Elwin is at 17bil on GOT and Midnight Madness comes on leading him to getting a free 30 million points, the idea of voiding the game is laughable to me, because the impact wasn’t material.
Now if he was at 30mil and the Midnight Madness made allowed him to get 17bil, then you’re talking about a material impact.
The word “significant” is in that verbiage for a reason.
This happened in my group at league on GOT. Fortunately, where other players scores were at, it didn’t impact the outcome. Only reason this happened is because the game was not in tournament mode. One time me and Neil Shatz played a Zen doubles qualifier on NBA Fastbreak at MGC and got Midnight Madness. On that game, all shots are 3 points in MM which is a huge advantage. Final ruling was that game was thrown out and we had to restart.
I’ve ruled on this before on Congo. Make a player trap up one ball. Let everything else drain until timer is up. At the end the screen clearly shows midnight madness total = X number of points. Then simplest play on back to normal and subtract X number of points at the end of the game.
I lost a game at 24 Hour Battle on Congo due to Midnight Madness. It was an accident of the software settings – oh well! Game was playing the way it was meant to play.
I run tournaments at a bar where we do not have access to keys and have little to no influence over game settings. I had never even thought about the Midnight Madness issue until someone got it on Junk Yard (not at midnight; the game’s clock is not set right) during a tournament I was running. The two players did not come to me about it at the time, but one of them mentioned it to me after the tournament was over. As this was a match between two fairly “casual” players, it significantly affected the game’s outcome by giving a big score boost to the player who got it (and he went on to win).
I really don’t want Midnight Madness screwing with matches in the future, so I am actually going to add a clause to our official rules (which are already highly tailored to the specific and sometimes challenging issues of our venue) to account for it in the future. I haven’t worked out exactly what to do with it yet but it will probably be treated as a beneficial malfunction. (And, if I can figure out exactly when it does happen, I might make provisions to avoid starting Junk Yard near to “midnight.”) I can see the reasoning that “it’s not a malfunction” under IFPA/PAPA rules, but speaking as a TD – in my tournaments I just don’t want it to be a factor!
I don’t remember this happening to you Bowen. Did I rule on this or Mark? I may just be forgetting it at this point. Hard to remember all these rulings for that event…
Curious how we dealt with it knowing how I have ruled on it in the past. There is no universal setting to turn these off and I completely forget every game that has them sometimes. For the most part we tend to have games in tournament settingings but not all of them seem to do things like turn these modes off.
Yeah if it started and everyone played on and we didn’t show up before it was over there isn’t much else that can be done. Besides void the whole game which isn’t a good call at all. We will try and squash things like this even better next year.
If only you hasn’t lost that match you might of gone on to win the whole…
