I’ve never owned or had huge amounts of time on Bride of Pinbot, but I thought I knew it well enough. At league tonight, I learned that I was wrong…
I had a reasonably decent ball that went on for several minutes of the usual multiball cycling. As the ball proceeded, I started noticing that my bonus X was getting interesting just through random bounces… 10X or 11X by the time I drained.
What I didn’t realize was how much my base bonus had grown. When the machine showed that my bonus was ~4M before the bonus X started counting up, it was a serious “WTH!” moment for me. Total bonus for that ball was ~45M, which was over half of my total game score. (For competitive reasons, our operator has intentionally nerfed the percentages of the top couple Big Wheel awards, so the billion shot isn’t possible, and I don’t think 50M is either.)
I’m now thinking that just shooting the spinner lane to the pops repeatedly is a viable multiball strategy, especially if your bonus X is already racked up… and/or shooting for the 5K standups, which I’d normally never think to deliberately shoot for, but they’re not actually very drainy.
I would say your bonus was out of the ordinary, and wouldn’t think bonus would be a BOP strategy. If the feed from the pops was 100% controllable without taking skill (hold up right flipper and ball stops every time or bounce over and hold up left and ball stops every time), pops might be a strategy to mix in with your left ramp, but my general sense of that game is that even if the ramp is nerfed as you say, the left ramp is still the best strategy. Only if the big wheel was only awarding 1 million per shot would I consider changing (and I might not change).
Going left ramp all day has other advantages -
Increasing skill shot multiplier at least once per cycle (if you are extremely unlucky).
Increasing the 100k/200k/300k award for the ramp shot that goes through
You get the pops anyhow from the hole
The various awards for causing her to speak/see/bringing her to life are significant
On most machines you can devise a way to control the multiballs easily and each multiball’s goal is very simple and also only involves shooting the left ramp. The multiballs themselves are relatively easy to control (either by bouncing over, shooting the center ramp or throwing a ball or two in the pops or around the horseshoe on the right).
On very difficult BOPs I have amended the left ramp all day to include some shots at the little wheel to get the jackpot if maxed or close to max. I have never subscribed to a center ramp strategy.
Also, I was told that the settings on BOP didn’t allow for 100% elimination of any awards, so I wonder how this operator accomplished this?
You can’t entirely eliminate any big wheel award but you can set 50M, 1B and 1M percentages to 1% and then virtually all big wheel awards will be 10M. I’ve done this to our BOP on league nights but the darn thing is too hard for most of our players to even get far enough through the left ramp cycling to claim an award.
I believe the 1B, 50M, and 10M percentages on our game are set to 1%, or 0% if that’s possible. Additionally, the timer for the Billion shot was set to its minimum, so even if it does award Billionaire Club, there’s literally no time to make the shot, so that award is effectively zilch.
I own a BOP and have never seen a bonus that big before. It does sound unusual unless you were playing for a significant time? Even having games where all I have gone for is centre ramp or loops I haven’t achieved a bonus that big - and that’s 31 loops and a 28x bonus. Not saying anything wrong happened but it does sound out of the ordinary.
As you guys have mentioned, the billion can’t be turned off. We had the same settings in a comp here in Australia and someone still got the billion award. The only real way you can turn that off is block the left ramp (or, on some BOPs I’ve seen, ensure the flipper mechs are so crappy you can’t make it UP the left ramp!).
For a big wheel’less game in a tournament setting, as G_Money states a good strategy is the little wheel. Another one is the centre ramp - that turns into unlimited millions after a couple of hits. Depending on the BOP, you can roll over from right flipper to left, make the shot, and repeat.
You can also go for the backdoor billion… Light all the out and inlane extra ball lights and bam: 1 billion points. Not that hard to do with the left loop awarding an extra ball light with enough hits once per ball…
It was a reasonably long ball, but not ridiculous … probably 15 minutes. About the only thing I can say is that I did throw a fair number of balls up the spinner lane (typically to get one out of the way during multiball), and both the spinner and pops are nicely tuned on this machine. It appears the main bonus is a typical switches-add-bonus sort of thing… anyone know the actual bonus added per switch?
On this machine, I’ve never seen anyone be given the opportunity for the Big Wheel Billion. Yes, it’ll sometimes award Billionaire Club, but never actually light the shot. We got to talking about the backdoor billion, but I’ve never gotten that myself, either through the EB trick or the 10-way combo trick. (Are there others?)
When I got the backdoor via the EB, I actually got it twice. If you were a particularly skilled player, I reckon you could get a stupid amount of billions this way - light all 4 and get the billion, collect one EB and drain. Launch, relight EB via left loops, collect billion, drain, and continue for as long as you’re able.