My answer is 4. And the question was, how many top 100 games have I not played. So I guess I need to seek out those 4 games. Dialed In, TX Sector, Spirit, and (shocking) Congo. Though I have been in front of three different copies of Congo, and each time, they were broken.

This looks fantastic! Well done!

At the end of the day Stern Pro should NOT be grouped with LE. It is deceiving.

I'm a lil confused..thought that games that were basically the same were gonna be grouped together? My 'top score ' is rated 31 on the em top 100, but the '300' the 4 player version is at 130...but overall, good job Robin..

It seems like people vote up the games they own to increase the value of their investment rather than a true gameplay rating.. the people's comments are the only part I read and you have to scroll through most of those to find actual reviews. Check the Alien comments, i think someone rated it after seeing it & playing it once!

They are not going to do that for EM pins at this time (no grouping)

People write reviews after eating at a restaurant only once,
again these rating systems need to be taken with a grain of salt.

Only just seen this but great idea to group games, thanks again Robin & Martijn for all your hardwork on another improvement to pinside

Why are 8 Ball Deluxe and EBD-LE combined, But Centaur and Centaur II not combined? Same game different cabinet in both cases.

And honestly, the EM crowd doesn't have the same manipulation going on. For instance, Lucky Hand is the top rated game right now. My saying that won't send a dozen EM trolls over to the ratings to rate it as a 3 and tank it. They may not agree it is number one, but they won't act insulted by it.

Well they should. Wouldn't someone own their favorite machines? I mean makes sense right? What kind of idiot owns machines that aren't the ones they like best? Lol

Well, eventually we do get to that perfect collection in theory. But, in the middle, there are a few trials and tribulations to get to that grail collection. Also, there are some awesome games coming out these past few year and rumored to come out in the next few that shake things up a bit. That's what is so beautiful about this hobby.

and not one of them is Stars.

Why not, and the rankings will still fluctuate.

I love the top 100!

To counteract your opinion, I hate the top 100. I give your post a 3.2, which is just high enough to not be called a troll rating.

Talking about troll ratings, I noticed a famous toxic member has already been redoing some pin ratings to try to get just above the troll discount threshold.

Purge Pinside purge!
https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/pinside-staff-announcement-please-read

You mean Meteor!

In the top 100/various/manufactures, the Pro and LE's and vault editions are still in the list as different machines and not together like the new style.
will this be changed to? I think it must...

I'm curious about the necessity of getting rid of 'old votes.' Now without anybody getting all bent, let's just say that Pat Lawlor or Steve Ritchie died. And let's say they had each gone through and rated 300 games on Pinside over the years. Dead or alive, their opinion about a game matters. By eliminating votes from Pinsiders that are no longer active, for whatever reason, you could be eliminating votes from very good pinball people.

I appreciate the changes, and I appreciate all of the hard work and all of the thought that went into this. Please do not take my comment as a criticism, because it's not meant to be critical. It's just a thought.

I asked that before, of the top 20 Stern only 12 different pins are represented.

Can you explain the reason behind this? Unless your goal is to reflect only the rankings of currently active Pinside users, a rating made in 2015 should still have as much value in 2017 as it did in 2015, regardless of account status.

Not to speak for Robin but I've been campaigning for this for years and I'm super glad it happened. It makes the ratings so much better.

First of all, it cleans out all the dummy accounts people made back in the distant past just to manipulate rankings (you'd be surprised how many accounts were created one day, ranked 15 or so games immediately, then were lightly used for a month and then vanished).

Also, back in 2009 (if that's when you were rating and then left the site forever) you never got to see modern games. No WOZ, no Tron, no Dialed In! or whatever. You just saw the games up till 2009. If you stayed on Pinside since 2009 and then just didn't rate anything so be it, but if you vanished in 2009 from the site your rankings should not stay as it is not reflective of the current population in 2017 that has a superior ability to rate games of today to games before 2010 (to a person who has vanished).

There are many other reasons, I could go on for hours about why Legacy votes needed to go from the top 100. The comments and what not remain from back then, and if the people log in their ratings from 2009 will return. This was a great move.

Or maybe it's just that people buy games they like. I actually own two top 20 games I don't really like because the opportunity came up to get them and maybe I can learn to like them (TSPP & WH20).

Check the Alien comments, i think someone rated it after seeing it & playing it once!

How many people can play Alien multiple times right now? Not very many, unless they go to shows or live very close to one of the very few Alien machines out in the public right now.

Yep, people - if they can afford to do so - will buy and keep the games they like the most. Full stop.

I think my top rated game is X-Men. It's my personal favorite game. Has been for a long time. Periodically I'll play my TAF, TWD, or GoT more but I'll always go back to X-Men.

exactly my point!

Super well said

I agree with this
but

I think the above reason is totally not valid,
for wanting the Top 100 to be current
with only current (active user) ratings.

My ratings for pins never take into consideration what other pins may or may not be produced in the future.
I rate pins each onto itself and the art, sounds and play-ability it has on its own
not how it compares to unknown games of the future.
Just because some game in the future will possibly blow everything away produced in the past,
would not change my ratings for a game(s) i rated in years past.

I assume this need to have an active account with last 365 days
will probably not apply to the EM top 100
cause unless we go back in time there are not going to be any more EMs produced.

It should. You're rating things like toys, lighting, sound quality on a scale of 1 to 10. Certainly as technology improves, something that was a 10 in one area might be an 8 now. For example, in 1992, the sound quality on TZ might have been a 10. Now it would have to be well below as other games have shown what can be done with uncompressed audio in stereo, not crackling, etc.

This is a good point. Can any game that doesn't have color changing LEDs really get a 10 for lighting? Can any game without an LCD get a 10 for animations? ...I'm not so sure.

LOL !!! great point...

Answer: DUH/YES.

Best light shows are:

1. Early 80s Bally pins with one lamp per bonus point: See Fathom, Centaur, Embryon
2. no stupid flashers that blind you and laugh in your face
3. killer programming to do fun things with the lights when it's attract mode, bonus count, or multi-ball start...

Today's games with:

1. no/few bonus lamps
2. stupid flashers

cannot compete with games of yesteryear in the lights department.

And don't even get me started with the whole twenty inserts flashing at once horrible ui that is customary today.

-mof

LOL...yeah, no.

1950 Gottlieb Knock Out gets a 10 from me. The animation of the boxers is amazing.

Marcus

Wow. If you're citing attract mode as part of the main game feature set then you've just proven what a snooze fest the game is.

Eliminating ratings from non-active users sounds like a possibly misguided reaction to a real problem. It's easy enough to weed out those one day account ratings without affecting all old ratings of former users. After eliminating those, I'd be fine with a formula which reduces weighting of apparently stale ratings (based on date posted, account status/activity). I'd also add that re-editing older ratings should increase weighting, as it would reflect a more contemporary opinion. All this would effectively age out ancient ratings from closed accounts, and keep ratings fresh. It sounds like Robin has some of that already in place.

Thinking about it further, I don't believe my opinion nor my ratings change much over the years no matter what the new games look like. You yourself point out that a 5 year old pre-LCD game is your favorite (I actually agree with that specific opinion) regardless of what has come after it. A couple of my favorite games are 80's solid state, alphanumeric games without modes... years haven't diminished their ratings relative to anything released in the 30+ years since.

In MOF we trust.

By that logic, if every unit of a particular title from the 50s has been destroyed (and most likely this is the case for some titles), then no review of any new game is valid because it can't be compared to the classics.

What if my opinion hasn't changed? Does adding "in 2017 this game still sucks" to my South Park review really help anyone?

Only if the member(s) who supplied the ratings are inactive on the site.

If a member has logged in within the last year, then the ratings count. If they have not logged in for a year, then the rating is not factored in. If you have an older rating for a game, it still counts as long as you are an active member.

As long as you log in to the site, then your rating is factored in. The idea is to only count ratings from active members, which you obviously are.

Let us try this analogy on for size.
Let us assume a website was created about appreciation of pop /rock music;
People rate songs over time as the music is released.
They also rate songs from some past perceived classic era of music.
Persons die or move on to other things,
yet their opinions about the music
from that time period (when rated at that time) or about music of the past
is still useful and valid, despite the fact that new music is still produced and released
long after the (oldtimer) poster is long gone.
Assuming this website is still active for decades,
most of those ratings of classic songs or even songs that are only a few years old will be lost,
because all the new teeny-boppers active on the site,
will most likely be the only ones rating the schlock of the day
(which somehow they really enjoy;
i.e. rap or boy band and synth/dance crap or whatever crud is popular in that new day).
It perpetuates the myth that only the new can be good and anything old is lousy.

Now if the intent of the new Pinside rating system is to have
the top 100 reflect solely the current active members mindset then
i guess they will succeed.

Now get off my lawn!!

Your analogy is flawed as music doesn't necessarily improve with technology. However, if the entire recording is taken into account and recording quality is one of the criteria, (much how our pinside rankings work) then a recording in the 50s cannot possibly score a 10 in recording quality for example when compared to a more modern recording. Someone that ranked the old recording quality at a value of 10 should be around to update his ranking or if not that ranking should fall away.

When I rate a machine, and I'm rating sound, etc., I'm rating it based on my knowledge of the technology that was available when that machine was built. I'm not comparing it to today's technology. So my overall rating of an '8' is based on machines from that era, not comparing them to machines that are made now. And some of what's being made now does not compare favorably quality-wise with machines that were built 30+ years ago (proof? scroll through a few pages of Pinside and all of the complaints about Stern machines).

Nothing will be lost or deleted. All the reviews and comments are still there, anyone can read the old legacy reviews.

But the Top 100 rankings will continue to be generated every week with active reviews... ie: people STILL ALIVE (and participating on Pinside).

If the effort here is to reduce weight of a rating based on age, then yes it would help. However, as I said before, I'm not convinced that opinions actually change much over time as new games come out... neither for pinball nor for music, as used in another analogy. I suppose the only real question is whether ratings from inactive users provide value to the top 100.

So you think it's perfectly fair and possible for a machine on the 50s that only had chimes to have a 10/10 sound score an the fact that's equal to say woz with stereo and a sub very high bitrate sounds is just fine? I don't think that the rating instructions, which do exist, say anywhere to take into account the technology of the time. That's just irrelevant when looking at the overall current ranking of a game. We are rating the game as it stands, not the design skill of a game. If a game has a 10/10 audio score it should be the best audio in a pinball machine - a 10/10.

That's just the way I do it. Take The Black Knight, for example. I think I gave it a very high rating for sound. When the machine was built, it was innovative, and there wasn't anything (or much) like it. To give it a low rating for sound wouldn't be right, because in that era, it was the best there was.

Hi robin,
Thanks for the job.
Would it be possible in the custom section to get ranking by each main categories (game design, sound, artwork, other aspect)?

thanks you're great.

Thanks robin
Us old guys usually resist change
but we know you are always working to make the site better.

After some reflection, I am OK with the (official/default) Top 100 (Modern) pin list not including
dormant account ratings, (to better reflect current active members ratings);
as long as one can make up (research) their own "custom top 100" to possibly
include all ratings (both dormant and active),
while hopefully still eliminating obvious troll ratings (excessively positive or negative)

Games in that era really should have their own top 100. To compare any of those to even a game like Corvette (which is mediocre) is crazy. They have great art, but pale in almost every other category to more modern games. To say some of these games are better than say BDK (which actually does sit lower in the current top 100 than at least one), is crazy. I guess it's a little subjective, but still...ask anyone who doesnt have the brain warping nostalgia for them and they'll agree. The sound/music quality and variation isn't there. The animations aren't there. The rules aren't there. The gameplay is slow. It's just a different time when a 32" CRT color tv impressed.