This should serve you well. Playing out of turn comes up fairly often, just make your players aware that they should watch out for it and it will still probably happen to them rarely and they will be disqualified on that game when it happens.
and are you ok with players rebooting an game (some places donāt want someone to do that)
Never seen anyone care about that. I certainly donāt. If your game has some weird issue that arises from rebooting it, make sure itās known so players donāt reboot it, or fix the game.
I have been in a few situations where it was a problem. One was bad machine without battery, so the settings changed on power cycle. That game should never have been used (it was pump and dump).
The other was Cactus Canyon Continued, where there was a startup procedure needed. So powercycle is bad.
Some machines it can be risky to powercycle quickly (without the caps discharging) because of the computers. Or at least they say.
That said it is extremely common for high level players to powercycle machines for strategic advantage, like clearing physical locks.
For what itās worth, in my part of the world, tournaments seem to have a rule against power cycling without involving a TD more often than not.
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Now the one odd case is what happens if there is an tilt / tilt warning as players are being added?
Is that just an start over?
The game has started and player 1 needs to take it?
But what if player 1 did not hit the button?
other cases players log in and old ones from last game show up
multi play login and one or more is out of position?
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We will cross these bridges when we come to them as TDs. I donāt expect to ever come to them.
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and will you be ok with players just starting over on there with out asking an TD in an case of some odd issue on start?
I could see a group using a multiplayer game thatās already in progress (at ball 1, with all zeroes for P1) at a local tourney thatās set up for coin drop.
And regarding rebooting the game:
- at locations using card readers for coin drop, rebooting the game will sometimes cause the card reader to reboot, and some card readers take FOREVER to reboot, so no pin reboots allowed unless a TD needs to do so for ruling/malfunction/tech purposes.
- when there arenāt card reader issues, then I allow any player to ask for the game to be rebooted. If even one player asks for it, prior to P1 plunging their first ball, then itās granted.
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Yup.
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But what about when there is construction on the bridge and only the left lane is blocked? What about that?
What if the right lane is blocked but itās on a Friday when there is lots of traffic?
What if two of the three lanes are mostly clear but a barrel of Vaseline falls off a Ford flatbed 350 and causes a player to slide and damage their rental car?
Checkmate, reasonable people. Youāll never answer every pointless scenario I can dream up.
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You jest, but why not think through some what-ifs to help make your decisions more consistent, even if the situations might be unlikely to occur?
I, for one, appreciate JoeTheDragon for bringing up some scenarios. I like thinking through rules and loopholes, and Iām not the weāll-cross-that-bridge-when-we-get-there kind of guy. Iām quite happy to cross that bridge right now, and if thinking through some āpointless scenariosā gets me there, Iāll happily consider them all.
@JoeTheDragon, could you poke some holes into Game starts when P1 plunges their first ball, nothing before that matters? What could go wrong?
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You should and you will as a normal result of your own experience and opinions of other TDs.
Slack channel and Discord are good places for additional real-time opinions.
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I have to disagree with that philosophy and that analogy. Iād rather know the condition of a bridge before I am midway across it. I find these kinds of hypotheticals useful because they serve to clarify what a rule actually is. The point of them isnāt to describe a situation youāve actually seen happen, but to make sure the true nature and scope of a rule is understood. Or to put it another way, the purpose of edge cases is to test where the edge is prior to walking over it.
I get where youāre coming from even if most of the room seemingly isnāt with you. There is a lot of value in thinking through scenarios, even if the specific ones devised are unlikely, and what they tell us about the rules. Iād rather have thought and discussed them before I have to make a ruling that could cost someone a tournament, not in the moment. Iām probably coming to this from a different background than most: reasoning through rules and principles is involved in my day job. Reading really nitty-gritty discussions about rules here on Tilt Forums is pretty much my favorite reason to come here!
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Basically every hypothetical is covered by TD discretion. If I need help in the moment, I use the available discord and slack channels. Easy peasy.
game is set to auto plunge on flipper button and that is not told to players?
Not all players have been added.
P1 or others can abuse the rule to get an free tilt test. (when practice is not allowed) But need to look out for old EM on where you need to hit an button to see if it is tiled or not.
I know this one! You pull a Dukeās of Hazzard move.
I appreciate reading these hypotheticals sometimes and other times I just chuckle at them. @umbilico described a sincere interest in working out the best solution so Iāll jump in; but in practice Iām closer to @chuckwurtās philosophy.
ā-
Earlier you proposed:
How about if that same scenario occurred but it was P1 who plunged the first ball of 00 game with the correct number of players on it. How would you handle it if they said, āof course thatās not my ball, no one from our group pressed the start button. I was just clearing a game that someone else walked away from to make sure there were no balls in physical locks.ā
I guess all Iām saying is that maybe you should tighten up the phrasing of ātheir first ballā in your proposed definition of game start.
I donāt think the scenario I proposed needs a written rule and TD judgement in the moment would be fine. If that scenario came up, Iād say that P1 will likely have to live with whatever score they ended up with unless their hand was rapidly moving from the plunger to the power button or they had already confirmed with players from their group that they were restarting on a clean game.
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Rules are fairer and more transparent than discretion or back channels. I would rather have rules. Rules canāt cover every possibility, which is why there has to be a clause for discretion, but it should be as small as possible. Further, rules may produce unintended and even perverse consequences and itās better to think about what those might be in advance and possibly fix the rules, rather than just arbitrarily override rules whenever it feels right in the moment.
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