that is very true and often mistaken for “overly debounce friendly” stern…
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I disagree. The continuation of play had nothing to do with the ball that went out the outlane, and everything to do with another eligible ball that was clearly above the “fair/foul line”. PAPA.org has a very explicit definition of “death save”; New Pinball Dictionary has a similar definition. This situation was completely different from either of those definitions.
I continue to be perplexed at the insistence of the competitive pinball community that the famous adage “the ball is wild” is only acceptable if the outcome is unfavorable for the player.
I believe Zen’s move was legal. He did not bang-back or death-save the ball that was below the flippers, nor can I find any other rule that was violated. And I’d hate to see a rule making it illegal to shake the machine once the ball has gone below some arbitrary line, because I’d imagine about half the scores in every tournament would be “DQ”.
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Well, there is one thing, which is to just set the game up so this doesnt happen. all you have to do is make the tilt reasonable, and adjust the link switch and the move is impossible.
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How do you even expect to possibly enforce a rule written to ban something like this? There would be so much judging of intent it would be crazy.
I’m completely baffled that there is even a discussion calling this “illegal” in competition.
Sure, draw the line at the outline - no nudging once the ball crosses into it. …Then no free spin nudging on wof… How dare you Spell TOTO! … or the billion other games where no one ever batted an eye, because its actually a thing to manipulate the ball in the outlane.
Draw the line at the ball below the flipper… Wait, what about center posts… Guess we can’t nudge there…Or that rule about balls stuck on things, and the player having to nudge them out…
No more walking a ball out an outlane… over the line!
The player in question caused a switch to activate by nudging, with a ball that was on the playfield, while it was still their turn, and the playfield was active. Are we now going to ban nudging the ball around slingshots, because a player causing a sling to fire or not fire by nudging is illegal?
I mean sure, every TD knows to try their best to avoid a game setup that gives free points/features when a game is nudged. Champ pub is an offender if not set correctly, and many others. A solution is just don’t set a game up poorly. And if something slips through the cracks, terminate the game under the rules for a malfunction / significant scoring malfunction (way too harsh in this case imo), but don’t punish an individual player.
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Lies! I had tilt warnings on, but with a super tight “Wipe-down the lockbar-o-death at your own risk” tilt. 
/pours one out for tim
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Agreed.
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So… why are death saves not allowed, but this is okay? I really don’t understand the difference; to me a death save is a nudge to try and continue play after the ball has drained.
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You know the world is flat if I’m agreeing with Schober, but I fully agree with Joe’s definition of a death save. If I were to show off what Zen did to a friend of mine, I wouldn’t explain that to someone as “Watch me do this death save.”
PAPA’s definition is:
“A death save occurs when a player moves the machine quickly to the right and forward, bouncing a drained ball back into the field of play.”
You can call when Zen did a “Spadoodle”, and then argue that “Spadoodle’s” should be illegal by definition, but your argument that it’s a death save I just can’t see holding water at all.
Oh . . . and Death Saves are not allowed because IFPAPA rules say they aren’t (Section III, Paragraph 7)
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Right, I really was talking from a “spirit of the game” POV. Agreed you can’t punish a player at the time. My take would be that they should have switched over to virtual locks after qualifying or at the next possible round after identifying the “exploit.”
On a side tangent, here’s a situation I ran into at Pinburgh. In a group playing Gay 90s, someone figures out that when the post is up and the ball is leaning on the left side of the post, a shot goes straight to the hole 90% of the time and is ejected safely 90% of the time back to the center to repeat. Now this was figured out on ball 3 so we had 2 balls of exploiting this (of course there were a few house balls and you still needed to get the post up and the ball settled.) Afterwards I was thinking do I have a responsibility to tell a tournament official so they can decide to pull the game? What if Gay 90s was chosen for the finals and it turned into a morass of hour long EM games?
The trough switch aids scoring by counting bonus on most machines, so this might need a better definition. 
I thought death saves and bang backs were originally banned due to people kicking the legs and breaking lockdown bars trying to perform them.
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Min/Maxing risk and reward to achieve a better score to win?
You describe the player doing some things (raising a post, getting things set up) and then capitalizing on what they have set up. As you noted, it was %90, not %100.
The game wasnt scoring its self - i imagine the player had to flip.
It doesn’t really sound many degrees away from a player on a gottlieb DMD, making a wide open shot, the ball returning to the flipper and auto-trapping on those crap flippers, and then making the shot again over and over. Lets go gladiators!
I mean, yeah it sounds like its a bad game choice for an event, but imo is actually very much IN the spirit of the game.
-cAyle
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So, as long as I don’t move the machine to the right while doing my death save, I’m good. Got it.
As the rules sit TODAY . . . I guess that’s technically true
I’ll work with Doug and Mark to clean up the ‘slang language’ verbiage in the rules to explicitly lay out the action of a Death Save and Bang Back.
Rest assured we’ll cover shoves in all directions that involve bringing the drained ball back into play under any circumstance besides a lazarus.
If you’re playing in any tournaments though before we update the verbiage, practice that lefty death save. I call it “The Stranger”
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Josh, while you defining things, please define “normal gameplay”. It appears I have been interpreting things wrong if nudging captives balls, nudging for well walker hits, slimer shimmy and shaking the ball off mist are normal gameplay. But a super jackpot switch that triggers on pop bumper hits is a malfunction.
Can you just portmanteau that and call it “slanguage”?
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Pretty easy . . . anything that’s not explicitly covered in the rules as illegal/malfunction related is considered “normal gameplay”.
Except that dreaded PARAGRAPH 10, where it’s the wild west and anything goes (depending on the strength of your relationship with Adam Lefkoff as your council)
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Circular much
A minor malfunction is any incident without external cause which deviates from the normal course of gameplay,…
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),…
It seems normal gameplay is anything that is not a malfunction and a malfunction is anything that is not normal gameplay.
Bingo! NAILED IT!
(except for illegal moves . . . and Paragraph 10)
Getting back to Avatar, has anyone done this on more than one example of the game? Or is most everyone talking about the Buffalo game? I’ve played a bunch of different Avatar’s and never seen this exploit.
Wouldn’t a micro-switch adjustment correct this problem? Link is about the best use of the jail bars in pinball. I’d hate to lose that lock. Along the same lines, it seems more and more ‘features’ are getting disabled for tourneys lately. Mist on BSD especially. My BSD was used at CAX at least 3 times and Mist never had an issue. I understand it’s required on some games, but it’s happening more than it needs to happen IMO.
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