I have to first ask a question about game rules on Guardians.
When in Groot multiball, is the drop target supposed to ever stay down, or does a hit immediately cause the drop target to reset in the up position? I’m not very familiar with Guardians, so we didn’t know how it was supposed to act.
We have one in leagues that’s been having random drop target issues. Once every once in awhile, the orb shot will grab the ball, refuse to drop and get stuck up. It happens very infrequently and the operator is attempting to resolve the issue. We’ve left it in play since it only happens once or twice a night.
With that said, we had a player in Groot multiball last night that managed to get a ball stuck behind the drop target. He tried a few times to release the ball by hitting the drop, but it just kept resetting. He trapped up assuming it was the drop target misbehaving and I removed the ball from the drop target.
My question is, if the drop target is supposed to stay in the up position during Groot, would that have been ruled a stuck ball?
There is no feature in Groot Multiball that would cause the drop target to trap a ball (other than for a split second), so a ball stuck behind the drop target would be considered stuck.
As a comparison, the ball trapped behind the target during the opening/SJP shot in Orb Multiball is not considered a stuck ball as that is a feature as intended.
Do you mean that the drop target is supposed to function normally during Groot? Meaning one hit drops it, the second hit holds the ball and then it releases the ball?
We’ve had similar issues with the Guardians our league uses and never actually resolved it. Typically a ball will get stuck behind the raised drop and effectively disable it the orb shot for a ball or ten, and it’ll get released at some arbitrary future time when the drop decides to start dropping when hit.
The game does seem to compensate reasonably well for both getting a ball stuck behind there and releasing it at some later point but you do need to be careful about instructing players to drain down to one ball if they do get a freebie release.