Best advice - Drain threads that bother you.

Worst advice - Oh wait. I gave that advice. Never mind.

Best advice - buy pinball machines for your home
Worst advice - buy pinball machines for your home

Best Advice - Be patient... they made lots of these pins, so if the deal doesn't feel right, pass.

Can't think of any bad advice I've seen on Pinside...

Worse advice, believing everything in the game is perfect and has original pieces or no broken pieces no matter how much the seller can tell you without you personally seeing it in person.

Best advice - Read Vids guide
Worst advice - It's probably just a fuse....

Worst advice I have ever heard:

"It's perfectably acceptable to work on your machines with the power on."

They were not joking.
At that point, I threw up my hands, walked away, and did something non related to pinball for over a week.

My response is simple:
"You cannot teach rocks how to swim."

Kind of hard to take voltage and logic probe readings with the game off...

I just hope I don't win the most-worse-advice-giver in this thread...'cause I dolled out some doozies!

It is. This keeps the board repair guys busy.

LTG : )

Best - play before you buy a game. Games can always be had. Really no sense in having to buy in fear something won't be available.

Worst - nearly every "vs" thread. How would a stranger know what game you will like the most. I passed on several games because they weren't in with the cool group. Big mistake as some of my favorite games are outcast games.

We all know what I was referring to Cody.
Not bench testing, load testing, or voltage test points.

Yeah, just poking a stick at ya...no serious offense intended

Best advice is original Bally EM fuse holders are usually bad.

Can't think of anything bad.

I agree. The fact that any group of people here dictate the "good" and "bad" games is nonsense. It's funny, you can post a photo of one game and then another, one of the overpriced cliches, and watch it get like 10x more upvotes.

Pinside cliche "get upvotes fast at the cost of emptying your wallet" list:

EM: Atlantis, El Dorado, Abra Ca Dabra, Centigrade 37 (In addition to those titles, there's a huge "Gottlieb single-player games are the best" circlejerk, I love them too and respect that people have their favorites, as we all do, but some people have their head so far up their rear that they absolutely despise (and some even publicly insult) any other games, which in my opinion a closed mind is the worst thing to have in this hobby!)

SS: Fathom takes the cake (especially due to the awful pricing), but arguably 70-80% of the Bally solid-states (Mystic, Frontier, Embryon, SBM, Vector, the list goes on), Funhouse, Earthshaker, Whirlwind

DMD: Medieval Madness, Monster Bash, Addams Family, CFTBL (and perhaps Metallica, but it's still new and I think a lot of people genuinely like the gameplay and I've heard very good things about it from people with very diverse collections, and the prices aren't inflated as it's still being made new, so can't/won't really add it to the list)

Come on who doesn't change light bulbs with the power on....I might

Except that basically all of those games are top 100 for the simple fact that they are good games and get up votes because of it. I mean I LOVE Genesis and the original translite but I understand it won't get as many up votes as any of those games lol

"If you need to pull the playfield up, power down the machine, lift the playfield, then turn the power on."
(This reduces the chance for intermittent shorts)

-TBK

What exactly are you ranting about? Just about all those games you listed are considered great playing machines by a LOT of players. That's why they're expensive - people want them, supply/demand, hence they cost more. It's not some cliche or "secret group" deciding what games are good, it's simply the fact that the vast majority of people who buy pinballs want to own games that are fun and look good, and some games are absolutely more fun and better looking than others. And not all of them are expensive. Hell, I paid $500 for Mystic, and that's an awesome shooters game. Tricky to fill the card correctly but you can crush the bonus if you're perfect.

If you're complaining about the thumbs thing and pinside opinions, I must ask, why do you even care? Just buy the games you like and ignore the peanut gallery.

Read the Predator and JPOP threads from the beginning. You could write a book with all the bad advice given in those threads.

There's all kinds of general bad advice on Pinside.

"You should get a 'x' instead of 'x' game..."
Everyone's opinion on games is different. People should get what they like.

"I wouldn't spend '$x' on that game..."
That's nice...but you're not looking to buy or sell that game and don't know all of the details. People can spend whatever they want.

"Never have a game shipped..."
Oh please. Every game has been shipped at least once (from the factory). How do you think most games get moved between customers and some of the top restorers? They're shipped, both ways. And from respectable sellers, collectors around the world? Shipped. Now you shouldn't immediately trust and have a machine shipped from anyone, especially if they have no sales history, no reputation, no experience in shipping, etc. But a little common sense saves 90% of the issues from buying from a distance.

Some good advice I've seen that is worth repeating:

"Don't attempt board repair, especially on expensive boards, if you don't know what you're doing."

"Don't work under a powered playfield, IF you don't know what you're doing."

"Don't color bomb your playfield with colored LEDs in all of the GI."
Alright this one is just my opinion but I swear by it

Good Advice: Start a business in Pinball
Bad Advice: Start a business in Pinball

For sure....I saw a guy drop his playfield back down. Luckily he didn't have it powered on....broke and bent a ton of stuff

Best advice: If you want your woman to like pinball.....buy her a machine. Bought the woman a Funhouse.....and she has been hooked on pinball ever since.

Worst advice: Starting out in this hobby....and my buddy says "dont buy a Whitewater for 2500.00.....cause Whitewater is a tough game." The douchebag....i turned down a great buy.

Funny. I have seriously cost myself hundreds of dollars doing this. The last one was exactly as you implied. I was working on a light mod, power off, on to test, back off etc. When all was done, I was so pleased that I left the power on to lower the playfield...

Best advice: Play before you buy, ignore the "Top 100", beware of PayPal, take time to participate in tournaments.

No bad advice here, just some occasional wacky opinions.

Someone once told me to "go f#ck myself." Worst advice ever....

Worst: It costs about $30 to ship a playfield anywhere in the U.S. Hint: (not anymore)

Worst: Any price check ever

Worst advice: Don't operate pins.

Best advice...don't fix it if it ain't broken..
Worst advice...do u have a schematic? Who can read/understand these anyways?!

LOL? I work on pins all the time with power on. Many times its necessary.

I've probably led'd 200 some pins and no issues other than a blown fuse or two. It's not that hard to notell eff it up

Me too. But my advice is that if you are testing coils while doing this, put the interlock switch back to its normal position before pulling out metal tools and poking around.

Best: Remove balls before transporting machine
Worst:Failure to specify it was the steel balls in the machine to be removed

Might be because the top 100 is a load of bull. New machines always end up high in the rankings and fall down over a few years.

Games get voted up because they are pretty, not because they are that good a game. Great example of this is TOM. Beautiful game, boring as snot ruleset which is what its been called out on since it came out. Its number 11. Totan is another example of this as number 10. Heck, I'd lump monster bash in there as well. Its too easy to quickly see everything in it, but will give it credit that its more fun than TOM.

Top 100 is people trying to justify how much they spent. Whitewater is number 20. A game that for 20 years was considered a C-title is the 20th best? Give me a break. Its 20 because now that you can restore them people figured out it was expensive to do and so the price shot up. The game did not suddenly get better in the last couple years it just became worth more and people equate cost with quality.

No matter how much you paid for machine X it is worth 10% more when you sell it and any thing you added to it give at least $1 for $1 or more in added value.

Best advice remember it's only pinball

Best - don't preorder a pin, don't buy on credit and don't choggard the seller.

Best advice- take a break from pinside

Worst advice- please come back

I don't think I have ever gotten any truly bad advice here. Best advice was to figure out why the failure you're seeing is the machine doing everything right and then go teach the machine what right is.

Best advice: "Paypal is never a safe method for receiving payment"

Yes! I normally pull the coin door switch out to turn off HV on games that allow for that in case I get sloppy.

I don't even take the balls out anymore, I just jam a rag in the slot they come out or my personal games have the metal flap installed that blocks balls from coming out. Otherwise it's too much hassle to take the balls out and not lose them

Worst: Don't hesitate to pre-order with a down payment. (I did it with MMR and will never do that again)

Best: From someone in Google's RPG years ago, "You should check out this new site called "Pinside".

More advice over the years, I few more from memory or circumstances, not necessarily on PinSide, but also at shows and other forums. Try not to wince.

Round 2: "It's probably just a fuse, an easy fix." (attempted sale after identifying the game did not work properly, this is still a very common comment today)

Round 3: "Check the WPC PDB transistor" (even though it was an EM pinball machine, sometimes a little knowledge is dangerous in the wrong hands, this was a "here's your sign" moment)

Round 4: "Just use some teflon lubricant on the flipper assembly." (instead of replacing the coil sleeve, plunger, and coil stop, and actually cleaning their game)

Round 5: "Spray a little degreaser on the the bolt, and give it a couple of minutes, it will loosen right up." (while the game power was on, you had to see the look on my face, as the owner was completely serious, I asked if he had a fire extinguisher close by)

Round 6: "That is completely normal for game operation, do not worry about it" (massive sparks were flying off of an flipper EOS switch that had partially shorted, like a mini fireworks display, not momentary due to carbon and corrosion pitting of contacts)

Round 7: "I just remove the grounding strap, it resolves the issue." (so I can get electrocuted, but there is more to this story as it was related to grounding issues on a GTB SS80, which the owner did not know how to fix, the owner did mention he had frequent "tickles" while playing)

Round 8: "Spin the leg in a circle, that will get the acorn bolt out." (tearing up the cabinet, Instead of loosening the leg plate, I got the game up on dolley and headed this one off)

Round 9: "Alligator clips are perfectly acceptable for long term electronic repairs and connections, if you worried about them getting loose, hit them with a little daub of solder." (Owner simply being completely lazy)

Round 10: "There is nothing dangerous about a pinball once you turn the power off." (The person then proceeded to burn his face and eyebrows as a large capacitor blew up from a shorted discharge and fat fingers with a screwdriver that slipped)

Bonus: "If you are out of fuses, you can use a rolled piece of tin foil for testing purposes." (Because the person ran out of fuses, from making the same mistake over and over again as the game was never tested for short circuits, ultimately the board had already had further damage upstream from prior attempts at repair with this method)

The list goes on and on.

“The problem with forums is there is a lot of disinformation, and a lot of uninformed opinions affecting what people actually believe. It is normal for forums. In any kind of hobby, go to their forums and blogs, and you will see something very similar. It is the nature of those environments, and it does not even have to be related to pinball machines.”

- George Gomez

Best advice - don't buy an IM classic, spend the extra dough and buy a Pro

Best advice #1: download Clay's guides to fixing pins
Worst advice #1: putting a new repro playfield on that game would make it better

Best advice #2: a lot of the old Sterns and Premier games are amazing, and very few know about them
Worst advice #2: a lot of the newer Sterns are so much better than the older games

Best advice #3: go to Expo, you'll love it!
Worst advice #3: get rid of all those incandescents. Everything looks better with LEDs!

And if you can PM me the link to Clay's guides, I'd appreciate it. Don't post it; it'll get removed.

Just do some googling, it's out there....

Worst advice: Buy Predator from Skit B.

LLOL. and also sadly true