Semi-OT rant:
If you look carefully at 0:45 there's a wild that lands behind a sticky wild (2nd reel, 3rd line). This happens quite often at DoA, even when you don't have many sticky wilds. This IMO shows some kind of randomness in the bonus round.
The way
I think it works is the number of wilds that will land is determined when you trigger the free spins and then they are randomly distributed on the reels. If that's the case then OP here triggered at whole lot of wilds, possibly more since we can't see if more of them landed behind the stickies on the first line. It'd also make it even more frustrating when you get 9-10 wilds with no line.
We learned from the horse's mouth that in the base game, the slot acts like it has "real" reels with random stops but during bonus rounds it's "different mathematics". That could be it.
PS for Blathaon:
I got a 1500x win with no line, is that a record? 
I had one for 1695x in December
https://www.casinomeister.com/forums/threads/show-me-the-money-screenshots-min-1000xbet.32622/
As for your theory, i too have been wondering how it actually works. My thinking have been that the outcome of the feature might be decided when you trigger it.
The wild distribution seems to predict whether or not you will get a wild line. If you get more than TWO "extra" wilds that aren't part of the main line then it seems to be fucked. What i mean is that when you get a wild line it's rare to have a lot of "useless"/"Misplaced" wilds, if you get more than TWO of those with a wild line then you always get them AFTER you have gotten the wild line and not before. (again this might just be patterns that I/we see but that are just random and meaningless).
Your theory makes more sense, it would be interesting to know how it actually works.
A side note since we are talking about DOA:
I have recently noticed that something have changed. You know before that if you launched several windows of DOA from the same casino either in free play or real play then when you hit the bonus all the windows played one spin each until the feature was over?. This wasn't unique to DOA, it affected Excalibur also and possibly other NetEnt slots from the same era.
Well this is no longer the case, now DOA and Excalibur works just like any other NetEnt slot, you can have several windows and they are all running separate instances of the game.
I have no idea why this was changed, i don't think that the way it worked before gave you any advantage or disadvantage.
Though it certainly might have confused some players, so it's a good but seemingly useless change, i just hope they haven't done any other "fixes" to the slots that we don't know about
.
Edit: it seems that the changes i mentioned only applies to some casinos
No idea why, but at Betsson DOA works like any other NetEnt slot and you can have several windows open and they all behave like separate instances, but at Guts it's still like it used to be.
