I’ve got one on loan for IFPA15 and @pinwizj says there is something that you can exploit, but isn’t sure himself.
I honestly dont know the game, but would like to try and bastardize it so it’s usable.
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According to the game notes at https://papa.org/learning-center/directors-guide/?target=game-setup
"Top players’ strategy is to shoot the left lane repeatedly for an award that builds to a large F-14 Hurry Up, resulting in very long play time. A gate in the top right allows balls shot along the top inner loop to come around repeatedly make sure this gate is working, or players will unfairly be able to get larger bonuses for shooting the top lanes and bumpers."
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So as long as the control gate is working as expected then it’s fine to use?
Its fine, it will just be extremely boring. I remember being at Pinburgh on a bank with ID4 and we were behind a group consisting of @Smack847, John Kosmal, Jorian and … I forget who else. They easily spent over an hour just on ID4.
Make top right gate always open or just remove it so ball always orbits to UR flipper from left orbit
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That was even worse if one of those four players was your ride back to the hotel 
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Sounds like a plan
Ok, 2 control gates and a 1 way gate all gone, if the ball finds it’s way into the pops now it will be a miracle.
Going to rerubber, clean and rebuild the flippers, anything else I should be thinking about before reassembly?
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See how it plays after that but I might suggest upgrading to stronger flipper coils. The ramps are long and steep and after extended play can get really difficult or impossible to hit.
Removing the gates is a pretty good hack. Honestly it would be fine if multiball was on easier difficulty because then you’d be tempted to go for it instead.
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A lot of work when disabling the F18 stand-ups would have sufficed.
Also, stop removing “the thing” from every game. /rant
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I agree. I play ID4 a fair bit in local tournaments. It’s boring and repetitive. But completely removing the gates ruins the game, IMO. There is such a thing as taking modifications too far. If it’s necessary to butcher a game to such a degree, it would probably be better to not use it at all.
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That’s what I’m trying to fix, but then you say:
So it’s boring and repetitive but you like it being boring and repetitive?
There are two other factors you aren’t considering:
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When you need a large volume of games, at some point you have to use Turds, I can’t afford every single A list game on the planet and when someone says “Do you want to keep X game for a year or more to use in your tournament” the answer is always yes, which brings me to point two.
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Beggars can’t be choosers. If I’m running around to my local community saying I need to borrow a game for almost a year so I can spend the time and get it tournament ready, most people aren’t going to want to hand over their MM, AFM or TZ. I get ID4, SnS, and Class of 1812, so I gotta work with what I got and if @pinwizj says “We’ve got a schedule and a 2 hour ID4 game every round doesn’t fit in that schedule, so fix it!” I fix it.
Make sense?
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Good to know, cause I was also thinking about making multiball stupid hard, I’ll keep it on an easier setting.
Yep! I totally get Cayle’s argument in wanting to let players attack a game the way it should be attacked. Unfortunately with the schedule we’re trying to stay on, games like ID4, TOM, etc. will either get the hard pass from us that it doesn’t fit with our format, or we find a way to get the game to fit within the format constraints.
Whoa. You’re using a TOM, too? What’s the L orbit nerf mod on that one… disabling the L orbit switch?
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It’s not just the adults, either, lol. I remember when this game was in the Juniors final’s bank back at PAPA 15. @multibrawlr had already secured first place with an 8 through 2 games that year, but the other three players were playing for second. Escher won the game with 3.6 billion to Justin Ortscheid’s 2.6 billion to Tiernan Konopasek’s 1.5 bil and the game took well over an hour to play out. I have a 10 minutes of video somewhere of Escher hitting the upper loop a bazillion times before collecting the hurry-up.
While I appreciate @pinwizj needs to keep his tournaments on schedule, I’m with @cayle on this. It’s way more interesting (and awesome) to Let. Them. Play. (and play and play and play…) and see who can do #TheThing ™ the best. YMMV.
No I’m not using TOM 
If I wanted to Nerf Tom, I would turn the one way gate around, so you could still shoot the orbit, but it would come back at you on the left flipper
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Anyone trying to loan you a T2?