Lies.
“Tournament Directors reserve the right to adjust scores on electromechanical machines if an obvious error has been made and the integrity of the match in question can be maintained.”
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So, @pinwizj, are you are saying that not adding points to a score after a witnessed software malfunction is common knowledge (or common sense)? Hmmm. OK-- my bad. 
However, only one player at our tournament had ever encountered or experienced this rule, and I spoke to many who were years and years more experienced than myself. So maybe it should be added to the official rules at some point?
Evidently you never add points to a player’s score, no matter what the circumstances.
Lies.
PAPA 14 World Pinball Championships Final Round - Terminator 2 - YouTube
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I’m going to make a short video about this entire situation and post it on Twitch.
But the assertion that points are never added to a game is simply wrong and impractical.
If a player has 900 points in an EM game, the final ball’s bonus count is 150 points, and the thousands reel fails to advance from 0 to 1, there is no way the player’s final score would be 50. If everyone saw the reel fail to advance, then what he just experienced is a minor malfunction, and the players final score is 1,050. Likewise, if the thousands reel had skipped 1 and jumped to 2 and everyone saw it happen, there is no way we would praise the player for getting 1,000 free points.
The goal of these rules, as I read them, is always to make the player whole. In this incredibly wacky situation, there is no way to properly compensate the player for this bug because he could never relight the original Solar Value jackpot without playing a compensation ball on a brand new game. Therefore, do we permanently penalize the player for a bug he clearly saw during an action he could never re-perform during his current game? No. We have to make the player whole. Doghouse awarded him 510,000 points, which brought his current total to around 930,000 points. (I mentioned this to prove there is no way he could have collected the value and then lied about it.)
We clearly told the players before the tournament that the first Solar Value would be 510,000 points. To fail to award that would be to put that player at a disadvantage versus the others. Short-changing a player only creates animosity, and other players would take notice. Fairness must rule the day.
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Ultimately as long as you’re consistent with the ruling, it’s not a big deal.
Pinball games have software bugs all over the place where what’s shown on the display doesn’t match what should be rewarded. I’ve lived through that as a player and as a TD myself.
I did not see the incident. The question I got was:
“What happens if you hit the ramp and it doesn’t score and people see that it hasn’t scored?”
My response had to do with the physical nature of a switch registering or not, so my response was you never manually add points for a switch that “should have” been triggered on a made shot.
Now having seen the situation on video, I wouldn’t have made any decision on the fly. I would have gotten together with my entire team of TD’s and talked about it. My opinion to my team would have been where I usually start on all rulings . . . “Sorry player you’re fucked.”
If the rest of my team felt strongly about giving them the points, I wouldn’t have put up a fight against it.
While my T2 points were scored manually for me at PAPA 14, that’s not how that ruling would have been handled today by my staff (or PAPA’s staff) . . . even though I NAILED THAT SUPER! 
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As promised, here’s a video (highlight) on Twitch I just broadcast.
That was a weird one! I thought your call was the correct one. The game recognized the Solar Value shot, and even showed how much it scored for it (“00”), when that same first Solar Value shot and same game state for the first three players showed “510,000.” It was a simple, fair, easy-to-explain, and expedient call. Job well done in my opinion!
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Yeah the switch registered clearly. The game didn’t do what it was supposed to do after that. Same as if an EM didn’t count up your bonus, and you clearly didn’t tilt.
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I am testing a fix for this now and it seems to be working.
There are way too many ‘pinbot tournament roms’ out there! They all seemed to do something different, or similar things, all accomplished in different ways.
For sure the one that was all jackpots 1m was a bad one too easy for a runaway.
[quote=“PinballYeti, post:23, topic:3221”]
Lies.
PAPA 14 World Pinball Championships Final Round - Terminator 2 - YouTube
I always suspected that this was the ruling (made exactly ten years ago this Saturday!) that led to PAPA’s not adding or subtracting points from a score. Three years later in Pinburgh playoffs they stuck to this rule of not adding points, not compensating me for one or two hit jackpots on Funhouse that didn’t award points. Even one of my opponents confirmed I hit the jackpot shot during multiball, but they still didn’t add any points.
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I just like to say, that generally speaking you should be really careful about what the display indicates as points awarded. In celebrations.
Sometimes, in game code, the to-display procedure is not related to the add-score procedure input parameter(s) at all. And they might deviate either from something that was not aligned correctly in design. Or as a bug that shows its face on special and perhaps seldom occations.
On these older games, if the display says “ONE MILLION”, for instance, that is most certainly a fixed string printed to display without any formatting (or even switch-case’ing). A “1,000,000” might be formatted.
Funny that someone brought up the 1000-reel not advancing on an EM as example. That can happen in software too. Infact I have found one. In Pool Sharks. If a jackpot advanced is to increment the million digit, and that happened to be by adding a value in the 10s, it fails. Effective decrementing by 999,950.
Finally, big-up to @normaj for diving into this bug and making a detailed report. Not only for bug fixing, but also for the eligdibility of games, it is important to have documentation, footage, software rev used and settings.
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Thanks Soren, but my main purpose for making the video was to squelch the speculative chatter about exactly what happened, what IFPA rule would apply in this situation, etc. Looks like we’ve all just about accomplished that.
Again, the key difference in this situation related to adding points was that the player could never ever reproduce the situation that would permit him to get the 510,000 over again. The ship had sailed. He could only collect 100,000 from then on. It would have resulted in five times the work to compensate for a basic failure in the software.
In the case of somehow not getting awarded a jackpot during a Funhouse or T2 multi-ball, the situation is different. You can always get another jackpot. Doors will not be permanently closed to getting a high value jackpot because you failed to get credit for one.
Here’s where you lost me. If the game registers the shot, does the animation and we know exactly the points the player should’ve been awarded, I’m giving them the points every time.