Quoted from Ceemunkey:Ah I wonder if that's the issue one of my mates had. I loaned him my HW, and one game he said he was hitting everything all the hurry-ups, all the super jackpots - his score was off the charts (like 122 million, I can't get anywhere near it) - but then he got locked out of everything and he was just shooting the ball around with apparently nothing to do, no scoring etc. I thought maybe he'd reached the end of the code, but now I'm thinking maybe he was locked in a pumpkin mode with one shot left and just it didn't time out?
Yea pumpkin modes aren't timed so they just go on and on. The three playfield modes all have timers to activate their MB feature. This was a problem before 1.10 with Sanitarium as it used to not have a timer and you could be locked into that mode till you drain.
In various modes lot of the playfield is simply non scoring so if you get locked in a mode with no other modes you can stack onto it, you are basically stuck with one or a couple targets. I somehow had this happen once when the game bugged in Bob and Lynda, only shot was the final balcony but the diverter had closed the house and nothing I did could open it, so I also couldn't really score anything.
You can normally have other modes you can hit to start and do things, but it is possible in this game depending on combination of modes you play you get stuck with essentially a dead playfield forcing you to make a specific shot to move on and nothing else. It's frustrating and why I've brought up in the past why I feel they need to open up more gameplay scoring during certain modes, provide alternate shots that at least do SOMETHING. Light up some random blood to earn blood, maybe create special lit shots that provide end of ball bonuses, or end ball bonus multipliers.
It's just not fun when the game feels like it's just a bunch of bricked shots.
Course just adding a timer to the pumpkin modes would be helpful, if anything make it generous if you want the modes to last long, but we really need the modes to not lock us out of the game, they at least fixed this issue with the sanitarium timer's addition.