How some people can achieve such ridiculous scores?

[hawk]

I play for an hour or even more, then I check the leader boards and see someone having score ten times bigger than mine

It's not about skill, this part is possible to understand.

It's about the time it takes. I highly doubt someone would play 10 hours and I'm quite familiar with table rules

so the question is how?

 

[Lord Boron]

It's not always about time. If you have knowledge of the table, how to stack modes, and maximize the jackpots and bonuses, you can score hundreds of times more in just a few minutes.

 

[hawk]

I wonder how many tables have glitches that allow to rack up a lot of points quickly

 

[Mark W**a]

My AFM score (3rd) took about 2.5 hours.

I can't speak for some of the scores that are 4 hours or more.

I wonder how many tables have glitches that allow to rack up a lot of points quickly

It's honestly not that. There are no exploits like that that I'm aware of.

The thing is some tables allow you to circle. Medieval Madness has an unlimited amount of extra balls off of Royal Madness.

If you're good ebough to never screw up royal madness, you could theoretically go forever. But even the best players screw up eventually.

 

[PC.Doctor]

I wonder if they achieve such a high score by simply hacking into TPA and changing their numbers on the leaderboard? It could be a thought.

 

[Zombie Aladdin]

That sort of thing has plagued SEGA ever since it started doing online leaderboards. For the most part though, anyone who does that is usually not smart enough to make it obvious (like a score full of 9s).

The ridiculous scores just come down to the tables being free to play once you purchase them. Once played enough times, one can get a superb score like that. Personally, I feel it's best not to try to compete with the top scorers, because if you focus on that, you'll be driven mad. I don't even look at the leaderboards at all.

 

[Zaphod77]

While cheated scores do show on occasion, fairly often these 6 hour games DO happen for real. It all depends on the table, and how well the rules and physics are abused.

 

[DokkenRokken]

I never understood the fun or/and fascination in playing a game for a high score?

I always just played for fun or to beat the game. In this case, it's to complete objectives.

 

[superballs]

I've gotten some decent scores but I never care enough to learn a table so well as to absolutely maximize score. Those who do get those amazing scores usually dedicate a lot of time and effort to doing so and they do earn their place on the top of the leaderboards. The hacks are generally obvious

 

[AshleyAshes]

Not gonna lie, once in The Williams Collection on Tales of the Arabian Nights, I got a ball STUCK on a roll over. It just SAT there slowly racking up points endlessly till I exited the game. It could have theoretically made a record Xbox Live score had I allowed it to.

 

[EldarOfSuburbia]

I got two balls "stuck" in the crate during Crate Multiball in Scared Stiff. It was continuously spamming jackpots. I think I scored 40m+ before realizing what was going on and killing the game. Theoretically I could've left the game in that state overnight and come down to a stupid score.

It was a "Challenge" game and those scores don't count on the leaderboards, but glitches like that can and do happen and if you can easily set them up, you can get huge scores without even sitting in front of your console/PC.

 

[brakel]

My AFM score (3rd) took about 2.5 hours.

I can't speak for some of the scores that are 4 hours or more.



It's honestly not that. There are no exploits like that that I'm aware of.

The thing is some tables allow you to circle. Medieval Madness has an unlimited amount of extra balls off of Royal Madness.

If you're good ebough to never screw up royal madness, you could theoretically go forever. But even the best players screw up eventually.

I wish I had those kinds of skills. In a good game I complete royal madness once.

 

[vikingerik]

It's about the time it takes. I highly doubt someone would play 10 hours and I'm quite familiar with table rules

Well, recheck your doubting. The scores really do take 10 hours. Some folks zone out on video games playing Candy Crush or some such. Some do it with pinball.

Medieval Madness gives out extra balls not just for Royal Madness, but also every time you complete Castle Multiball by collecting all 7 super jackpots. I find that even easier than Royal Madness, so going infinite on MM is very easy. It's not even true here that the best players screw up eventually. Even if you drain a couple balls in a row, any one ball can earn any number of EBs back from Castle Multiball and keep going forever.

AFM has high scores reachable in the shortest time duration because there are no repeatable extra balls except the random video mode, so eventually there are no more EBs and the game has to end. My #1 score there took a bit over three hours.

The only table I've ever seen an unlimited score glitch is Black Hole, where a ball can get stuck repeatedly triggering the left slingshot. But this only scores about 50 points per second, so each million would take over 5 hours and a top leaderboard score would take 750, so folks don't seem to abuse that one.

 

[Jeff Strong]

Yeah, good players can play BOP or Funhouse for a looooong time in TPA, which is especially sad in the case of Funhouse since it's much more of a wicked pin in real life. A game of 60+ million is very impressive in real life, but no big thang in TPA.

 

[Espy]

Some of the tougher tables have high scores that would have taken short game times. I got #5 on El Dorado (it's probably lower now), but my game maybe lasted 10 minutes tops.

 

[nstalkie]

One glitch I had was with funhouse. Didn't take advantage of it. Basically I held the right flipper and each time the ball got kicked out from the kickout, it bounced up there again. You don't score much by shooting it in there, so I would have had to tape my controller and left it running for a week to even get a decent score I did let it run for like 10 minutes to see if it would ever stop or get kicked out differently, but it never did. Haven't been able to reproduce it yet (PS3 - pre-megapatch).

Wasn't there some bug where scores erroneously ended up in the black hole leaderboards?
The TotAN scores seem off to me as well, but that may just be because I suck at the table

Some scores are ofcourse hacks.

I can confirm that some people are willing to play for hours on end. I'm one of them I've had games in Twilight Zone where I had to take extensive breaks because I wasn't seeing straight anymore

 

[kinggo]

Yeah, good players can play BOP or Funhouse for a looooong time in TPA, which is especially sad in the case of Funhouse since it's much more of a wicked pin in real life. A game of 60+ million is very impressive in real life, but no big thang in TPA.

None of the IRL scores are impressive in TPA actually. It's the sam thing all over again, but I don's see the point of "simulating" the real table and then make it possible to score gazilions. OK, in TPA one has infinte numbers of tries per table and eventualy can master it but pinball game that lasts an hour or 3 or over 10......... boooooring.
By looking at leaderboards I totally suck at pinball but then the tournament came and I ended up as #20 or #21 and promoted to silver. So apparently I'm not that bad after all when we exclude PC and consoles and have a timed game in which one has to do something and not just exploit one mode or one shot. For hours.
We need separate leaderboards for each platform.

 

[Espy]

Can happen in real life too

 

[Kemetman72]

Well if someone scores 100,000,000 on Genie I want to shake their hand! I am terrible at that pin and have never liked it in VP.

 

[nstalkie]

Well if someone scores 100,000,000 on Genie I want to shake their hand! I am terrible at that pin and have never liked it in VP.

I'd rather run as far away as possible from this person. He's clearly not mentally stable