Sorry I haven't been around Pinside in a long while. Things have been ridiculous the past number of months and my pin's been sitting at a friend's place waiting for me to finally be able to reclaim it. (Should be any day now!)
However, I have a curious question for those who know more about the code in 90's and modern pins in general... Is it just my imagination, or are matches at the end of a game more likely when three or more people share the same match numbers?
Our local league, the LOPL, does this thing where we have "match prizes" throughout every league night, the idea being if you get a match at the end of a league game, you win a prize, which typically consists of things like pinball plastics, flyers, PAPA drinking cups, Tilt Amusements notepads, etc., though every once in awhile we have some more interesting things to win. (I won myself a Tron Deadly Discs cart for the Atari 2600 one night!)
The thing is though, since joining the LOPL in Spring of last year, I have triple-matched TWICE with the groups I've been in, and just a couple days ago quad-matched on WOZ! :O
As a game programmer myself with experience in dealing with probability, the odds of this happening seems incredibly remote. It's already only a 1 in 1000 chance for four players to all have the same match number if they're not intentionally trying to make this happen, and then you have to factor in another 1 in 10 on top of that (potentially skewed based on the pin's settings, so probably more like 1 in 12), so that means the chance for four people to all match at the same time from one game would be about 1 in 12,000!
League play was only once a month last year and is once every three or four weeks this year. Given my triple matches and recent quad match, it almost seems to me like these pins are coded so that when a triple-match or quad-match potential occurs, it's far more likely to generate a winning match than if only a couple people are sharing a match number or no one's match numbers are the same.
...am I on to something here, or am I just crazy? ;D
