Quoted from sosage:Let's say the game has a 2-ball multiball. Player 1 locks both balls on ball 1 but fails to hit the shot to activate multiball and drains. Player 2 starts his ball 1 with essentially both locks taken care of for him. He just has to shoot the shot to activate multiball and "steal" player 1's locked balls.

Quoted from sosage:

First of all, I am very interested in seeing it. If I see someone convincingly controlling this game, consistently, I can become a convert.
Secondly, I had a long babble trying to explain my perspective, but I'll make it shorter. IMO, competitive pinball is not 70/30 or 60/40 skill/luck. It's more 99/1, with 1 being for houseballs that require being psychic after the plunge to see coming and flukes where the machine tosses the ball over the flippers. On a well designed table, the risks and rewards assure me that every drain is my fault. Including if you put a fat rubber on T2's skull lock or take out the outlane posts...there is almost always something I could've/should've/would've done to either save the ball or prevent that situation from arising.
Fireball's physical risk/reward design seems so unbalanced (at least, only to me it seems ;P), even for competitive EM's, that it flips the ratio to something like 30/70. It's designed to steal quarters. A competitive game shouldn't ever be that the top player should win out most of the time, but the top player in that moment will win out all the time. Yah' know?
When I see Fireball in a lineup for a tournament, I cringe. I almost wish we could rock/paper/scissor instead of going through playing that game.
That was still long...damn.