How to tournament difficulty a game.

[Zaphod77]

General adjustments first.

1) disable extra balls. Unless it's an em that really needs them on.

2) set slingshots on a hair trigger. This stops many hold traps.

3) open outlane posts to the max. In extreme cases remove them completely.

4) enable tournament mode.

5). Adjust slope and flipper strength to taste.

6). For premiere games you usually want reduced scoring on.

7) disable unneeded ball savers. BSD needs it's ball saver badly.

8) randomize kick outs more

9) randomize rebounds from all stand ups.

10) weaken tilt

11) read papa tournament setup notes and make listed changes.

Specific tpa game notes. (Please chime in people)

Jack bot. Set extra balls to 250m and specials to 500m. Because it is AWESOME.

Twilight zone. Needs nastier slot kick out.

Elvira. Tweak ramp rejections to go down the middle most of the time.

The Addams family. Disable the power. Because people will just time it out anyway.

Bk2k. If you don't spell black your score doesn't count. this is the standard rule for machine owners.

Earthshaker. Tweak the physics so you cannot loop the ramp and can't nudge stall shoot or nudge pass then post pass.

Tee'd off. Remove the rubber stoppers from the habit rails so the balls go screaming towards the flippers

 

[Kratos3]

12) decrease nudge strength

 

[Gus]

10) weaken tilt

12) decrease nudge strength

Reduce the efficiency of nudging!

I'd love to see more randomized kickouts and bounces. Asking for ramp shots that can't be looped from certain angles is ridiculous - that's not how a pinball table works. Railroading (100% predictable patterns of ball movement) and nudging is what makes TPA too easy. And the guarenteed deadpassing etc that comes from those. Reduce the efficiency of nudging. Get some spin on the ball or randomisation off of boucing. Decrease or randomize rubber bounce. That will reduce game times by a lot!

 

[Zaphod77]

Earthshaker is pretty much banned from tournaments because it's too easy to loop that ramp in real life. The PAPA setup notes say to actually introduce flipper hop to keep people from looping that ramp till the cows come home.

What i described there is the equivalent of doing this in tpa. actually putting in the flipper hop is doable as well.

The randomization of bounces off of standups is my generic railroading fix. That and tweaking the kickouts.

 

[invitro]

1) disable extra balls. Unless it's an em that really needs them on.

Jack bot. Set extra balls to 250m and specials to 500m. Because it is AWESOME.

I wish that tournaments could make tables hard enough to leave EBs on. Removing EBs takes way too much strategy out of most tables, and I'm getting tired of it . Every table should have a (high) per-game limit, though.

Points for EBs would be a possibly acceptable substitute, except that the points are always not even remotely enough. The only reason to make tables harder for tournaments is to decrease the game time (in my opinion... I'd like to hear justification for other reasons). Thus the points for an EB should be a good estimate of what an EB is truly worth. I am not good enough at pinball or strategy to have a good recommendation, but 4 billion for an EB on Jack*Bot seems about right. (Obviously an EB is worth different points for different levels of skill, so make it the average of your expected tourney players.)

Here's a question for you guys: Is Diner too easy? By how much? How long do you think an average tournament game should last?

 

[Zaphod77]

the points an EB is worth should correlate with the difficulty of getting it. as they are hard to get reliably in jack bot, a high point award is worthwhile for them. Not with how much a good player could earn with the ball. In the case of jack bot, the change puts casino run on par with multiball as a point source. That's why they did it. because without this change, mega visor is out of balance with the rest of the game.

yes the entire point of removing extra balls from tournament play is to shorten game times. Yes it does affect strategy negatively at times. but it is the lesser of two evils, and is standard tournament practice, and should be duplicated.

The point of boosting difficulty is to decrease ball time, but also to stop people from going infinite. This has been done to devastating effect on real machines in tournaments. Gladiators is the most well known example, but some other games are really poor choices, such as earthshaker. Many games suffer from something known as player 4 itis. where the last player cab ALWAYS pull ahead as much as needed on their last ball. Games which suffer immensely in this regard.

Any one shot game. This includes back to the future, earthshaker, hurricane, kings of steel, checkpoint, etc. The first three let you plunge the ball to the needed flipper to repeat that one shot until you win. and people can and WILL do this.

Any game with catch up code in it. many have this to some extent in the mystery award, where a trailing player 4 on ball three can get a big boost. the worst is of course police force, which lets you add the highest player's score to your own on ball three, which guarantees a win for player 4 if they do it.

 

[Espy]

Earthshaker is pretty much banned from tournaments because it's too easy to loop that ramp in real life. The PAPA setup notes say to actually introduce flipper hop to keep people from looping that ramp till the cows come home.

What i described there is the equivalent of doing this in tpa. actually putting in the flipper hop is doable as well.

The randomization of bounces off of standups is my generic railroading fix. That and tweaking the kickouts.

What do you mean by introducing flipper hop?

 

[vikingerik]

When a ball rolls down an inlane onto a flipper, flipper hop is when it doesn't go smoothly but bounces a little bit on the transition from the inlane metal surface to the flipper rubber. Makes accurate timing and aiming quite a bit harder. It's usually an annoyance that indicates poorly aligned flippers or bent metal on the inlane, but can be done intentionally to add difficulty.

 

[Zaphod77]

ST:TNG has some flipper hop in TPA. that said, the hop is predictable, so it's not really an issue. In real life, flipper hop is a lot more random, and makes playing well nearly impossible on most games.

Properly functioning games should not have flipper hop, as a rule. Earthshaker is the only one where introducing flipper hop to stop people from looping the center ramp is recommended. That and data east star wars,where they outright tell you in the PAPA setup notes to align the right flipper so it CANNOT shoot the center ramp except from a cradle.

 

[Espy]

Interesting, makes sense. Thanks. Would flipper hop not make it a bit easier to cradle a ball coming down the inlane? It it comes into the upright flipper at a sharper angle it's more likely to rebound backwards? Or is it too subtle for that? Am I making sense?

 

[Mark Miwurdz]

Earthshaker loop? I've never played the real table. I do ok on the TPA version. Never found that loop easy on it.

 

[Zaphod77]

yeah it's harder then real life to shoot the center ramp already in earthshaker. but there are people who have better timing then I do who can loop it. It needs to be had to hit from a trap and impossible when not to make earthshaker a fair tournament game at all.

and no, flipper hop does NOT help you catch. in fact holding the flipper up and dropping it just as the ball reaches it is pretty much the only way to counter flipper hop. it's insanely hard to do.

what causes flipper hop is when the guide before the flipper is LOWER then it should be. so the ball hits the flipper rubber and bounces upwards instead of rolling cleanly onto the flipper.

ST:TNG in TPA has a small amount of flipper hop.

 

[switch3flip]

Left flipper on Big Shot in TPA also has flipper hop.