My VUK now won't shoot the ball to the habitrail for the iron throne now. It fires repeatedly and will finally make it after the 10th try or so but the mystery is timed out by then. Looks like I'll be doing some tweaking Monday. Guess I'll be tweaking the diverter gate then.

It turns out I had the coil pulse strength set to high. I turned it to normal and it's working fine now. I set it to high when it was taking two tries to get the ball off the iron throne, and thought I had it set back to normal. It must have been rattling around in the chute.

Edit: Nope. I got one good launch out of it and then it's acting up again.

The LE's/premiums don't have a skill shot, correct? There really isn't any reason to use the plunger that I can see.

I just went through taking the upper playfield and the "elevator"off. I did add some washers to the gate solenoid, but after I was done I thought about it. There is no way for a ball to hit those screws if they are sticking in the chute. They are close to the corners to where a ball would hit the side of the chute before it would hit a screw. I adjusted the diverter so that it fit tighter against the rail. I adjusted one of my upper playfield targets, but the leaf switch didn't have enough gap so I ended up taking it back off and adjusting it again. I'm getting pretty good at taking off the playfield now.

I'm wondering if the gate is not retracting fully on the mystery shot. Whatever it is it's bullshit that it's happening.

I tried adjusting the elevator and nothing was working. I thought I had found a fix by bending the small ramp from the diverter to the VUK down a little bit. Right after that it shot the ball out 5-6 times consistently. Got it all back together and it's still having trouble. I'm wondering if it's not software related.

I'm going to call Stern tomorrow and see what they have to say.

Spoke with Chaz at Stern. He said they have had a few VUK's where the roll pin has worked loose and caused issues. That will be the first thing I check, but I'm betting that's not an issue since it will fire correctly at times. I'm going to do a factory reset tonight (I installed factory settings, not a factory reset), and if that doesn't work I'm going to swap node boards to see if the board is having issues that drives the VUK. I'll let you know what I come up with. Next step will be swapping the coil with another one of the same specifications.

It's working now, working a little too well at times. Reset the pin to factory, swapped the node boards, but what got it working was adjusting the ramp to the VUK. I took it all off to take a look at it, nothing looked out of place. Put it back in, and bent the ramp up a bit. Popping like a champ now. I had to adjust the switch and bend it up a bit to get it to consistently register when a ball was in place. Now it's popping so well that it has bounced out of the throne a couple of times. May have to add a speed bump to the habitrail.

Ahhhh...I have some sheets of sticky backed black foam somewhere around here. A doughnut of that would work. Thanks for the suggestion.

Where is the setting that makes left orbits go into the pops? I'm on 1.29. I went through all of the standard and GOT adjustments and couldn't find it.

I'm no expert, but there are two inserts that say "Castle" and "Black". Lighting them both increases the bonus multiplier by 1.

Yeah, we're talking about two different diverters. I'm talking about the one that is behind the pop bumpers. There's s little ramp that goes down to the VUK. Try bending it up a little.

No, you can easily get to it if you pull the playfield all the way up and remove the VUK assembly. If I remember correctly, it's maybe 4 screws and one nut to get the VUK assembly loose, very easy job. The ramp is held on by two screws, but you can push up on it at that point without loosening the screws. You could also try loosening the two screws to move the ramp around a bit, but I think that bending it up fixed my issue.

Correct. I bent mine up 1/8-1/4" and then had to bend the switch arm up about the same for it to register. I hope you get it working, it sucks when you sit there watching the ball repeatedly not make the throne ramp and then time out.

Mine would make the playfield, but struggled with the shot to the throne habitrail. See post #719 above.

Glad you got it fixed!

They must have had enough complaints to make a change. Interesting, when I called them a month ago to see if they had heard of issues with the VUK making it to the throne habitrail they said they hadn't. I called back to tell them that bending my "chute" up fixed my issue.

Hodor multiball? Please tell me that's like "D'oh" frenzy in TSPP!

It's complicated, fast, and unforgiving. We've played it in league and it's just not intuitive enough to know what to shoot for. It's got a rather sharp learning curve.

For full disclosure I already told Gweempose that I have some black adhesive backed "craft" foam stuck on the front of the throne to help dampen the force from when it drops.

Can you link to this rulesheet?

Thank you sir! I think I've only gotten to Winter Has Come maybe twice and I didn't notice the freezing flipper, but I do notice that during multiball occasionally I'll have a flipper die if it gets hit with more than one ball at the same time when I'm initiating a flip. Is this a SAM thing, or an adjustment that needs to be done? I've never seen this before on any other pin.

And to add to the informal poll, I can backhand the right ramp from my right flipper easily.

I haven't noticed what gweempose has seen, but I think you are absolutely correct. I notice many times when balls are already locked and you shoot the left ramp that the game hesitates before releasing a ball. If they had a switch further up the trail like LOTR does this would probably help. The whole game seems slow at times. Progressing towards wall multiball animation shows up 5 seconds after the shot. I wonder if this is a limitation of the Spike system or just programming?