From: s892031@yallara.cs.rmit.OZ.AU (Pumpkin Power)
Newsgroups: rec.games.pinball
Subject: Australian Pinball Championships (long)
Date: 18 Nov 92 14:35:34 GMT

I just got home after playing in the elimination round of this contest, and
I must say I was not at all impressed by the way it was run.  What follows
is a description of how things worked - I'm very interested in hearing how
any major overseas competitions are run, surely they're not like this!

The competition is being run through a chain of Australia wide arcades
(for anyone who cares - TimeZone, yes, it is the only way for them to get
people to actually play their machines :)  Anyway, for the last month or
so they have been running a simple qualifying competition, score more
than 5M on T2, TAF, HS2, Black Rose, Fish Tales, Party Zone or Hurricane
to enter.

Then they take the top 1000 players and split them up into elimintaion
heats Australia wide, 16 players in each group.  This is were things
start to go terribly wrong.  I get a letter telling me to go to a
specific Timezone to play.  So I get sent to an arcade I've never been
in before, and they have a TAF and a Party Zone (I qualified on T2 - I am
a very average TAF player, and first played Party Zone yesterday when I
went to check the arcade out - they changed the setting on the machine
since then too :-/ )

Initially they wanted to play 2 players at a time, one on TAF and one
on Party Zone, alternate machines for 3 games and best 2 of 3 scores wins.
Now tell me the guy who plays TAF twice is going to lose.  Took about
10-15 minutes arguing with the organisers to get them to change this -
you might as well pick the winners by flipping a coin.

On top of this, their TAF machine has just about every possible fault
you've seen listed on this group implemented : Thing doesn't flip.
Any swap shot gives you 5X.  Pressing the right flipper button short
circuits the slingshot, 25,000 normally, and a lot more in Hit Cousin
It, Mamushka, etc.  Sometimes the swamp just swallows your ball and doesn't
kick it out. And many more! So instantly those players who are otherwise going
to get beaten start abusing the crap out of the right flipper.  Ultimately
it short circuits comletely (the score keeps going up by itself!), and
they shut the machine off.  At this point I've already been eliminated
anyway, lost by 1M points to a player who was a bit quciker on the
flipper during Mamushka than I was.

The are no service people available at night - besides which "the machine
was fully serviced this morning".  Yeah right, it was doing exactly the same
the night before.  So everyone is left playing Party Zone, most with as much
experience at it as me.  There was only one person there who had ever
seriously played the machine before, and naturally he wiped the floor with
the rest of us.

I decided to go to another arcade where the competition was running to
see what is happening there (the main City arcade for this chain).
There they are running elimations on 4 different machines (TAF, T2, HS2
and Black Rose).  This made more sense - at least if one player here
is a T2 wizard he can still get beaten on something else - knowing one
particular machine is no good, you must be a good overall player.  But the
operators still had little idea.  One guy got a ball stuck in TAF, so
they had to remove the glass to put it back in play.  He had already won
(with a 3rd player left in the game, who was not possibly going to add
300M to a 25M score).  But when the woman shuts the door she does it so
that that the machine gets slam tilted!  So there is a rematch, and the
guy who had his game tilted gets eliminated by 500,000 points.  I must
say, he did not look happy.

So how do overseas competition run?  Do they pick one machine and stick
with it, or pick a set of machines?  Surely they don't randomly pick
2 or 3 from a choice of 7, and whoever happens to know they games best
that get picked wins.  And I can't believe the quality of the machines
they used, of the 7 I saw tonight 4 displayed the credits period, and the
other 3 looked like they were well on their way.  Clearly I saw other
players tonight who were better than me anyway despite the machines, but
the way things are being run I doubt they will end up with truly the
best player at the end, just whoever is luckiest enough to get to play
the machines they're good at.

Peter Barton : s892031@minyos.xx.rmit.oz.au
Newsgroups: rec.games.pinball