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Gunch less, tilt less.
Also, make sure that the manual isn’t inside the game rubbing on your slam tilt bits. That happened in an SPL tournament once. No one could figure out why they were all slam tilting so much until they opened up the pin.
Ha ha ha. That’s a funny one. You see what I mean. How nice it would be for a director - and players - to be able to rule this a malfunction right away. Because I bet that the first time it happens, such a thing could easily end up landing on the player.
In the same ball park, I have seen problems with some extra strong locks seen some games. Don’t who fitted them originally. I might have been the Germain importer by request. Anyway these have lock mech stuff dangerously close to the slam switch. Seen to short. Giving ground short error state though on WPC. In some cases at least.
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Thanks for the detailed explanation on what a slam tilt sensor looks like and how it works! I actually didn’t know it was a separate mechanism from the tilt bob until I read this topic.
I’m still not entirely clear on why slam tilt sensors should be disabled for tournaments though. Besides the nightmare in the amount of time needed at a big event with hundreds of machines and different manufacturers having different schemes (and even the same manufacturer at different times), even the most thorough system for reporting cheating players won’t be perfect, and eventually, something will slip through that would’ve been caught by the slam tilt detector.
Essentially, to make a long story short, the slam switch is way more likely to falsely trigger than it is to actually prevent abuse when properly adjusted, so it makes more sense to just rely on the tilt to stop a player from nudging too hard. It’s also pretty bad to have one player’s dumb actions (or not so dumb, in the case of a misfire) affect the outcome of the match for the other three players by forcing them to restart / add balls / lose state / whatever.
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A slamtilt during normal gameplay is a malfunktion.
For all normal nudging while playing the game, you have the normal tilt that tilts the ball in play if you nudge to hard, and that’s how it should work.
The slamtilt aktivates when someone kicks the game (coindoor, or under the game) or lifts/drops the game. That’s the only times the slamtilt needs to be active. In large tournaments, there’s always lots of players around to alert the staff if a player is abusing a tournament game, so in those cases a slamswitch is simply not needed, it can only cause problems if it is not adjusted properly.
And even a carefully adjusted slamtilt can cause problems.
If, for eg. a game has to be open for some reason, a stucked ball or something else, opening and closing a coindoor can sometime activate the coindoor slamswitch.
And that’s not good during a tournament.
Ah, I see. So slam tilt detectors are more sensitive than they should be and can go off when the machine is jostled in a way that wouldn’t really be a slam tilt?
And this reporting of players…is it really that thorough? I always kind of assumed there are enough people who don’t pay attention to what’s going on around them or don’t care that there has to have been at least one case of a player being very rough with a machine and no one reporting them (or they stop when an official comes near and claims they didn’t do anything).
If a game is abused in an arcade, people might not want to get involved.
But it’s different in a tournament.
Competive players in a tournament is sensitive about cheating, and abusing games, and will call the staff.
I totally agree. But getting an arbitrary TD at an arbitrary tourney to agree on this, at incident, is a different dog. However, if the slam tilt shouldn’t happen because every switch have been taped over or cut, there is no ruling to agree on. It’s a malfunction.
A slam tilt sensor (switch), let alone one on a 20 some years old worn game, is never a measure of a player being out of code in a tournament. That evaluation should rely on someone involved in running the event.
You could say that neither switch is 100% accurate and could contribute to “unfairness”, That is true. But none other has a consequence as severe as the slam tilt. And other switches are part of the game (except buy-in and coin). Their mechanical nature and element of the game is some of the appeal of pinball.