Dialing Fireball EM for competition use?

So we want to use Fireball in the Bat City Open coming up soon because we don’t have access to a ton of EM’s. The issue is Fireball does some weird things and its mostly due to how complex the rules are for an EM.

An example would be draining one ball during multiple while simultaneously locking a ball in one of the scoops. We are worried that a player won’t notice that the ball count advanced and complain that they are owed another ball. I don’t think there is anything we can do about that, its just the way FB works right?

The bigger issue we are having is occasionally it will spit out another ball for no apparent reason. Sometimes advancing the ball count and sometimes not. We’ve messed with the trough switches and tried playing with the gap, cleaning them etc but, the issue still comes up. I think we will only allow 1 player games on FB even during classics finals but does anyone have any ideas on how we can make FB at least work as consistently as possible? I’m seriously considering not using it but, I’d love to have another EM.

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awesome game!

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Step 1: Take game off legs
Step 2: Fold up and remove any obvious metal parts
Step 3: Feed to wood chipper

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While I like Fireball and it’s worked well in some events, e.g. at PAPA, if this one is flaky, then I’d omit it and find another EM or a good SS game instead. Machines with issues will just slow down play, take up director time and frustrate the players. Having good-working games for a tournament is more important than having any specific mix of them.

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Totally agree. I think this one generally works and plays extremely well, better than the one at tpf for sure. I think we’ll use it but have some other ss games on standby.