Bug 10 Billion Point Rollover

[FurVid]

I think part of the problem is that 10 billion point scores are much more common with these settings than with the default ones. Hope we'll see a mode where the specials give credits (and go on a cross-all-tables credits leaderboard!). On my most recent game, I think I was scoring 1 billion/ball on bonus alone when the ball counter was still on ball 1.

I fear that the longer this goes on with way too many extra balls awarded, the more resistance there will be to changing it later and clearing the leaderboards. Perhaps best solution would be to have two leaderboards for each table, or maybe even three:

Casual mode (current settings with lots of extra balls, as it is now).

Arcade mode (should be new default - arcade-like settings and any credits awarded, whether for match, points, outlanes, etc. go on a new credit leaderboard).

Tournament mode (no extra balls available, could still give credits for credit leaderboard I suppose - but for scores this would probably be the leaderboard that the pros would use for bragging rights)

 

[szycag]

I'm nowhere near 10 billion yet, but nice to know a fix is coming. Too strange that the game's ROM isn't properly equipped, must have been really hard to program a workaround.

 

[Actionball]

I figured I would video my games on my phone to combat the rollover bug today. Really mickey mouse setup with my phone attached by rubber band to a tripod but it worked quite well, sort of.

Just after rolling over 10 billion I checked the phone and it had stopped the video, it does that at random so I look over a lot and watch the counter go. Take a look at the video and it did catch the rollover, all was well. Start a new vid for the rest of the game which goes to the 14.6 billion mark and ends with a sad foolish drain. Check the video, that one shows up as can not be displayed, its broken. Check the previous one, that I already viewed to make sure it worked...its broken as well now.

The score is a bummer for sure but there were some crazy things I wanted to have on video like getting trap door pinball mode 5 times in a row...only winning it twice including having the ball draining right through the left flipper while it was trapped.

So now I get the machine score bug, the phone bugs and to cap it off I have a couple multi GB files on my phone card that it wont let me delete because it says they don't exist.

 

[Richard B]

That explains why the highest scores stop shy of 10 billion. Personally, I like them emulating games down to the smallest detail. If it was broken in the original machine, it should be broken in the virtual version.

 

[Actionball]

If they keep the 10 billion rollover for consoles but let the scores ring up for other platforms that is not much fun. Currently the best you can be on a console is 67th. I think I have 69th with 9.94 or so while the mobile high score is 21 billion something, I don't know if it is a legitimate score but at least let me have a fighting chance of beating it.

They don't need to fix the game, just let it report the rolled score correctly. Failing that they need to put it on tournament mode and do away with the 10 ball games and have THAT be the high score of record.

 

[amv71]

So what is different in the mobile version to allow 10bn+ score recordings?

And, more importantly, is it not time to have a single consolidated leaderboard that represents all platforms? Or is that just not possible?

 

[Actionball]

I don't think the mobiles do actual emulation which would be a good explanation. Its also possible there are score glitch problems that seem to be on all the other tables. Does anyone here believe, even for a second that a 1.5 billion score on Black Hole is possible? One a phone even? The TOM scores might be glitched, but glitched or not I know I can break 21b eventually with the soft rules on multiballs.

I don't have any realistic hope of getting to 4billion on Arabian Nights though. The high 200/300m zone where most of the monthly/weekly scores are is well over an hour of play time, 3-5 princess rescues. I can hang in that crowd, I hope to be able to get to 500m at some point. But 4 billion is looking at a 20+ hour game with 60-100 princess rescues...Im not convinced there are a few dozen people cabable of that level of play who all happened to ring them up on release week. They need to fix the score issues and wipe the boards.

Farsight needs to wake up and realize that leaderboards that can be trusted are fairly critical to the long term success of this game or they will turn off the hardcore, longterm players who will just throw their hands up and say to hell with it, its not fair so why play. Casual players wont be buying DLC for this in 2 years, they will be buying Angry Birds 4 at that point. Its the serious pinball players who will make or break this game down the road.

 

[Sean DonCarlos]

I don't have any realistic hope of getting to 4billion on Arabian Nights though. The high 200/300m zone where most of the monthly/weekly scores are is well over an hour of play time, 3-5 princess rescues. I can hang in that crowd, I hope to be able to get to 500m at some point. But 4 billion is looking at a 20+ hour game with 60-100 princess rescues...Im not convinced there are a few dozen people cabable of that level of play who all happened to ring them up on release week.

Could be hacking, or it could be the fairly-well-known Harem/Genie stack: Tales of the Arabian Nights Harem Genie Battle.

Farsight needs to wake up and realize that leaderboards that can be trusted are fairly critical to the long term success of this game or they will turn off the hardcore, longterm players who will just throw their hands up and say to hell with it, its not fair so why play. Casual players wont be buying DLC for this in 2 years, they will be buying Angry Birds 4 at that point. Its the serious pinball players who will make or break this game down the road.

I think serious players will mostly disregard the public leaderboards once tournament play becomes available either as actual tournaments or just "tournament mode" settings with separate leaderboards. And personally, I'm more interested in the consistency of my game rather than my high score. It would be interesting if down the road FarSight could add historical/statistical data to each of the tables (average of last 50 games, average game time of last 50 games, etc.) to aid in tracking one's improvement, but I can see why this would not be a high priority.

 

[Actionball]

Rescue/Harem bug can be rocked for a lot of points. But 4 billion? Its very hard to get going and even harder to keep it juggled for any length of time as you can't see the bottle tug of war animation while its happening. So just a few ill timed shots or miscalculation on sandbagging and it will be over. I guess you could run this bug 10 times in one game but if you are that good you are good enough to play it straight up and still get the top score. I can run this glitch, I do not just as I refused to take advange of playing tilt off in PHOF.

Certainly there needs to be a tournament mode leader board and tournament only leaderboard. The think about pinball is that the modes only go so deep and just like with classic video games in the end it comes down to score. If you ever saw the (bad) documentary King of Kong and how serious they are about high score legitimacy you can understand the importance of a trustworthy scorekeeping system.

 

[brakel]

Rescue/Harem bug can be rocked for a lot of points. But 4 billion? Its very hard to get going and even harder to keep it juggled for any length of time as you can't see the bottle tug of war animation while its happening. So just a few ill timed shots or miscalculation on sandbagging and it will be over. I guess you could run this bug 10 times in one game but if you are that good you are good enough to play it straight up and still get the top score. I can run this glitch, I do not just as I refused to take advange of playing tilt off in PHOF.

Certainly there needs to be a tournament mode leader board and tournament only leaderboard. The think about pinball is that the modes only go so deep and just like with classic video games in the end it comes down to score. If you ever saw the (bad) documentary King of Kong and how serious they are about high score legitimacy you can understand the importance of a trustworthy scorekeeping system.

I've never seen the (bad) King of Kong, only the (good) one!

 

[Jeff Strong]

I don't think the mobiles do actual emulation which would be a good explanation.

The mobile versions are definitely using the ROMs.

 

[Actionball]

I've never seen the (bad) King of Kong, only the (good) one!

Its a fun ride, just not quite accurate. More movie than documentary. Check out "Rock-a-fire Explosion" documentary on Netflix, that is a rollercoaster full of crazy there

The mobile versions are definitely using the ROMs.

Then its just a score bug I guess. Are any of the tables reporting trustable scores?

 

[amv71]

I don't think the mobiles do actual emulation which would be a good explanation. Its also possible there are score glitch problems that seem to be on all the other tables. Does anyone here believe, even for a second that a 1.5 billion score on Black Hole is possible? One a phone even? The TOM scores might be glitched, but glitched or not I know I can break 21b eventually with the soft rules on multiballs.

I don't have any realistic hope of getting to 4billion on Arabian Nights though. The high 200/300m zone where most of the monthly/weekly scores are is well over an hour of play time, 3-5 princess rescues. I can hang in that crowd, I hope to be able to get to 500m at some point. But 4 billion is looking at a 20+ hour game with 60-100 princess rescues...Im not convinced there are a few dozen people cabable of that level of play who all happened to ring them up on release week. They need to fix the score issues and wipe the boards.

Farsight needs to wake up and realize that leaderboards that can be trusted are fairly critical to the long term success of this game or they will turn off the hardcore, longterm players who will just throw their hands up and say to hell with it, its not fair so why play. Casual players wont be buying DLC for this in 2 years, they will be buying Angry Birds 4 at that point. Its the serious pinball players who will make or break this game down the road.

Couldn't have put it better myself. I've already stopped pursuing the ToM leaderboards after discovering the 10bn rollover glitch. And I am interested in purchasing all future DLC, but not if the impetus to pursue high scores is removed.

 

[amv71]

Do we know if this rollover "bug" (I appreciate it is not a bug if we are being strict about Farsight's emulation) is fixed?

I had a 10,600,000 game on ToM last night but the game recorded 600m on XBLA. Yet the leaderboards for ToM show the highest score as being 25bn.

What's going on? Are some countries getting a 10bn rollover fix and others (UK, mine) not?

 

[ParallaxScroll]

Do we know if this rollover "bug" (I appreciate it is not a bug if we are being strict about Farsight's emulation) is fixed?

I had a 10,600,000 game on ToM last night but the game recorded 600m on XBLA. Yet the leaderboards for ToM show the highest score as being 25bn.

What's going on? Are some countries getting a 10bn rollover fix and others (UK, mine) not?

On my copy (US, 360), with the current version of PA it saves the wrapped-around score to the local high scores, but the correct score to the online leaderboard. So let's say I score 12 billion on Theatre of Magic. My local high score table will only show 2 billion, but the full 12 billion gets saved to the leaderboard online. Bride of Pinbot does the same thing with scores over 10 billion. Have you checked the leaderboard to be sure?

 

[amv71]

On my copy (US, 360), with the current version of PA it saves the wrapped-around score to the local high scores, but the correct score to the online leaderboard. So let's say I score 12 billion on Theatre of Magic. My local high score table will only show 2 billion, but the full 12 billion gets saved to the leaderboard online. Bride of Pinbot does the same thing with scores over 10 billion. Have you checked the leaderboard to be sure?

My bad. Thank goodness - it was fixed. It is exactly as you describe, ParallaxScroll. The game registered 600m,but the leaderboard does display the true score.

You know how you stick with a game to get the most out of it? Because I thought this ToM glitch was still there, I switched "allegiance" to Funhouse and really got into it . Despite experiencing the same flipper glitch as on ToM and TOTAN, it's still another utterly wonderful piece of work by FarSight.

 

[ParallaxScroll]

Funhouse is great! Probably my favorite table right now. I'm looking forward to more tables from that time period down the line.

 

[WilliamPorygon]

My bad. Thank goodness - it was fixed. It is exactly as you describe, ParallaxScroll. The game registered 600m,but the leaderboard does display the true score.

Exactly. As Mike mentioned a few months ago, they can't really fix the rollover for local high scores because the emulator uses it to set the table's high score list when the game is loaded, and it would wind up screwing the whole list up:

The local high score table will still be rolled over, because we haven't found a good way to handle that since the ROM can't. If we kept track of your real scores and then tried to push them into the emulator they would get truncated and the high score table would get out of order. For example, an 11 billion score would show up as 1 billion but be ahead of a score that was 9 billion.

The only possible solution I could think of is to have the game record two separate high score lists for each table; one that records the "true" scores including rollovers that is displayed when you choose it on the menu, and a second that records what the ROM would read/display the score as (i.e. not including rollovers) to be used by the ROM. But even that wouldn't really work, since it would lead to times where you'd either be asked to enter your initials for the ROM's scoreboard but not make the "true" high scores, or worse, not get asked by the game to enter initials for a score that does make the rollover-including list.

 

[bavelb]

Justto check up (neither TOM or BoP are my most played tables so sadly I hvent gone past the rollover point yet):

if you get a score of 10.000.010, do you get a highscore of "10" on you local highscore listing on nr 1? Or does the score not register at allt here because it didnt beat the nr 5 highscore?

Mike's quote above me makes me think the latter, buthas someone seen this?

 

[Squid]

If you have scored 10,000,000,010 points, you scored 10 for your personal leaderboard.
I wish my score of 32.8bil would stick.