I got asked to analyze a happening at the Bat City Open last weekend. I guess it was a tiebreaker, so ultimately a pretty big deal.
Here is the link I was sent: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/154325603?t=07h30m59s
To fully understand, however, we have to start a little bit earlier.
- 07:29:58 - ECMB is started
- A recent addition to the 6-series code was multiball ballsavers on the outlanes. It would seem not everyone knows about this yet. Note at the start of multiball, both TOTO and TNPLH lights are strobing green indicating they are active.
- 07:30:12 - a ball drains down TOTO
- Nothing happens here because the ball saver is on and the ball will be returned anyway. We don’t count progress towards multiballsavers while ball save is on so as not to waste them.
- 07:30:25 - a ball drains down TNPLH
- Same deal, although I’m a little surprised the ballsaver is still on at this point, honestly.
- 07:30:38 - a ball is lost down TOTO and lights up T-TO
- Notice the first O is still blinking
- 07:30:41 - center drain, multiball will enter grace period in about 2 seconds.
- At this point, notice TOTO and TNPLH go back to normal
- 07:30:47 - glinda collected for add-a-ball, resurrecting ECMB
- One noteworthy thing here is that TNPLH is blinking again, but for some reason, TOTO’s last letter (first O, second rollover) is no longer blinking. The other letters (T-TO) are still lit up
- 07:31:04 - ball drains down TOTO during the ramp->throne room transition on ECMB.
- I wouldn’t have necessarily thought it from the video, but it seems like the ball catches the second rollover, completing TOTO. The most important thing to note is that the ballsaver starts IMMEDIATELY upon the ball hitting that O, though
- it is extra-obvious to note this because the ballsaver lamp is not typically messed with in lamp effects, so seeing it start immediately upon the final rollover is very telling.
- 07:31:10 - crystal ball shot to start weak flippers/2x scoring
- 07:31:12 - multiball officially starts when ball settles in VUK
- notice right when crystal ball starts, the letters in TOTO re-activate and start strobing again. any consumed outlane multiballsavers reset when a new multiball is added to the stack, so this is expected behavior.
- also notice right at this moment, one of the balls drains down TOTO and nothing happens because ball saver is already on.
- 07:31:35 - center drain, nothing major here, ballsave is off
- 07:31:42 - ball drains down TOTO catching 3 of the lights again, T-TO. at this point, though, the damage is done with 2 2x throne room jackpots for 100K total
- 07:31:45 - ECMB and CBMB are over.
So, there you have it. I didn’t see anything unexpected at all, other than the lights not coming back on TOTO. I expect this is a bug, more precisely what probably happened is that the light state was restored for the lamp effect, but the process in charge of blinking the lights wasn’t restored. That would properly cause the lights to come back in whatever state they were in but not animate, so I can understand what happened there, also, especially since we just fixed a similar bug in Beorn in Hobbit.
I welcome any comments or questions. Hopefully that clears things up for people.