I'm pretty sure you can't collect a jackpot from the outlane on Bad Cats; you can get a Curiosity Spin on ball 3. You can *light* the jackpot but that doesn't do much good when the ball's already drained. Bad Cats' jackpot is significant but there are ways to beat that kind of score.

Lock stealing is a bit luck-of-the-draw but was very common in late 80s machines like Rollergames, Fire, Elvira, Jokerz, and many more. Only 3 locks for multiball on Rollergames! For Pinburgh 2013 there was an experiment with playing these games as 1 player only; player feedback was very negative toward this and it was not done again.

One moral is that when the tournament has 200+ games, not all of them are going to be wonderfully balanced competition machines...

Oh, no doubt. One other thing is that others' play leads you to different situational choices. If your opponent has 100 million on Medieval Madness, you're going to play differently than if they have 10 million. Or, you should anyway

They will be obvious, and nobody will like it, and all the money prizes in lower divisions will go to players who don't belong there.

Also know that at PAPA, a new player can select any division, there is no low end of restrictions, just a high end.

In my opinion, division restrictions are necessary in any event with substantial prizes for lower divisions.

Players choose their division upon arrival at PAPA, so there is no "making A". Any player can compete in A. Most choose not to, so they don't receive any points.

At events like Louisville and California Extreme, rather than have players choose A or B up front, players are judged to be "B eligible" or "casual eligible", and the B finals are based on performance in the main division. Think of those B finals as "bonus events". Some of this was spurred by IFPA's decision to only count top-division play for points; at LAX, everyone's qualifying play counts for points, even players who would otherwise have self-selected a lower division.

IFPA makes the decisions about how points are awarded, not PAPA, so you'd have to take it up with them, and they've already explained why they choose not to give points to lower divisions. The PAPA format has been the same for 13 years. Players choosing A Division will earn points, everyone else won't. Pinburgh awards points to all 700 players.