I had a doozie last night. Playing STTNG and I locked the third ball and started a multiball I needed badly to get back in the game.
Ball kicks out of the VUK to feed the cannon so fast it hits the wireform somewhere, goes flying over the canon to the left and drains. Haha. Multiball doesn’t start, bonus runs, turn over.
We were wondering, had I hit the gun trigger before it drained would I have still got to play my multiball?
There is a video of this happening to Bowen somewhere.
I had a similar thing happen to me years ago (epically posted to rgp way back when) where I skill-shotted for Final Frontier, ball didn’t make it up to hole, I couldn’t catch it, it drained, and it went to bonus after the countup (where I didn’t receive any points it said I did). During an FSPA finals match.
@keefer is correct. Here is the Special Ruling that FSPA adopted for this:
Special Ruling – Final Frontier Kickout: At the start of Final Frontier the game sometimes prematurely kicks out one ball. If this ball drains before Final Frontier starts, the ball ends, Final Frontier is not played, and none of the displayed points are added to the player’s score. This is a software bug, and the point value of the artifacts (100M per artifact + 1B per complete set) shall be manually added to the player’s score. This also counts as a major malfunction.
My understanding is that if the “made” switch is not actuated on either cannon, the trigger won’t be available, so no, you probably couldn’t have improved your situation by hitting the trigger.
At the very end.
I had an unfortunate moment on GB not too long ago. I was player 4 and step up to play my ball 3. I hit the flippers to select my skill shot and notice the DMD isn’t showing the skill shot. At the same time the ball auto plunged. I didn’t know what was going on. I feared it was player 3s ball so I tried to trap up and drained. No ball saver. Game over.
I was upset but didn’t bother to even ask for a ruling since I knew what it would be. But I learned a valuable lesson. Before touching the machine make sure it’s in the correct state. I was at another tourney once and saw someone step up to a game and the ball autoplunged on him. He could have just played it, but he just let it drain and got a consolation ball after the game was over. Can’t remember what game but sometimes it’s better to play two ball ones. If there is an easy to get multiball or something. But usually losing progress is bad. I wonder if the guy made a strategic decision not to play the ball.
And with GB I shouldn’t have tried to trap up. If it was player 3s ball I was already DQ’d so it didn’t matter to me if I scored a billion points for him.
I’d never seen GB do that… but player 3 said he ended a MB in an odd way where the balls got hung up in the trough after draining… so it sounds like the game lost track of the ball count.