Thought he just said, "discuss" in the cloud.

Unless you live in Portland, where pretty much every tournament includes clouds.

I haven't been to any tournaments but I haven't heard of any in which multiple cities compete with each other at the same time. But maybe I'm just too much of a newb to have heard of that. And I'm sure it can be done without using a cloud but I'm sure using a cloud would make it easier.

No way they'll ever do it for cash. T-shirts, translites and (weak) bragging rights.

The "Cloud"

As a technology executive I can tell you it means nothing more than hosted services which have been around for a few decades. Some marketing fool pinned "The Cloud" on it because that was the default icon for "The Public Internet" whenever anyone created a visio diagram.

The first true Software as a Service product as it pertains to what vendors try to call "cloud" was salesforce.com.

The "tournaments" aren't going to be hosted "in the cloud", there will merely be some type of aggregation or score keeping software on some VM hosted by some company.

Bah. I hate that term, its ridiculous.

What about leveling the machine.. is it going to have gyros in it to see it's leveled... what about Glass Joes? How will it know the glass is on? "Oh they will have a switch" how hard will that be to circumvent?

There will be no way to make sure someone isn't cheating period!

You will just have to trust or play people you know

I worked for IBM for 12 years as a Unix admin. I have spent a lot of time setting up "Cloud" infrastructure. I agree its a vague and meaningless term but its been drilled into me by IBM

Bah

Oh, well since I spent 3 hours this morning working around AIX limitations in filesystem permissions, could you tell your bosses how much I hate them? Seriously. Testicle punching would be nice here. In fact, $20 if you do it, per boss.

I actually DO work "in the IBM cloud" on a customer site, and lemme tellya, the IBM cloud smells like burrito farts.

Like I said, I "worked" (past tense) for them. They sent my job to India last year. But I'm still having problems getting "IBM Cloud" out of my brain.

WebCam may help with some of the issues mentioned. Placed atop the head pointing to the play field area. Would be nice to watch as well.

Understood but my bounty still stands. Sorry to hear about your job. It's a "cloud" that hangs over all of our heads these days.

Try using ACL's.

This is awesome news, probably come with the new system/LCD screen. Star Trek.....

I think connectivity adds a new element. Not to mention it could automatically post scores that are high on Sterns dedicated page. Sort of like Big Buck hunter or golden tee

Even if you take cheating out of the equation, it's still impossible to make two games play exactly the same to make it "fair" for competition. Players need to compete on the same machine during the same time period to make it as even as possible. That's why players at tournaments always compete on the same exact game vs. competing on seemingly identical games placed side by side.

It's all good. I was tired of always having to worry about my job at IBM. It has sent jobs over to India by the 10's of thousands the past few years. But I managed to land a good job and I'm much happier.

JFS.. Ahh how much I love it..

Even with GNU tools now standard in AIX it's still crap.

SMIT FTW!

I was told this at STERN standing on the LINE last year. Hardly news at all. When you go to Stern for visits its not about WHAT you ask ITS HOW YOU WORD IT!

It would still be fun to compete, it doesn't have to be taken serious like there is a million dollars on the line :/

Even if players play on the exact same machine, the same machine doesn't always play the exact same from game to game...rubber changes, flipper could weaken, target could get out of adjustment, kickout hole could start rejecting...etcetcetc...

Why yes, yes I would like to meet Steve Ritchie.

LTG : )

I am stilling giving him the finger Lloyd. If i see him i will prob say "Hey ritchie YOU SUCK" Then i will kick his weak pathetic KTM 450 over and ride over it with my GASGAS!

Exactly, like any online gaming experience you are always going to have your cheaters, modders, glitchers etc but the fun in playing online is tough to beat...

yes I gave a nice talk on this, with graphics, 2 years ago at the NW Show....he thought it was cool then too...abought time....maybe a few sheckles will come my way?? Jpop

Maybe he will pay Williams for design theft too..... Never a leader always a follower has been since 1986.

Think bigger, yet smaller. Think of tournaments where you're playing locally, but want automated score keeping. Think of having a row of Avengers, X Men, Dark Trek into Star Ness, and Metallica all in a row. You hit start, hold up your player's badge with a QR code on it to the web cam. Game recognizes you, and at the end of the game automatically uploads your score to the tournament server.cuts the pain of running a local tournament by 90% right there!

You stop it right there Vince with your innovation, Stern will have none of that nonsense.

we wanted to start small...just share scores....across the world...

I'm sure instead of something useful Stern well probably come up with something idiotic like trying to tie it into your smartphone or Facebook. Some bad ideas are so bad they just should never have made it past the internal filter.

They needed a dedicated site to post stuff to for sure, with forums, tourney dates, high score tables etcetc... using Facebook is super lame-o

Not allowed in existing major production filesystems with complex shared mounting schemes. The effort/cost of rolling out the ACLs requires unmounts/remounts and it's just not gonna happen here. We have to constantly work around limitations in commands like chgrp because when they expanded the groups list to 128 they didn't update the command binaries to look beyond position 16 in the list.

The data engine side of that already exists with Aurcade. The interface for Aurcade is refs with Ipads, though, not the game uploading data on its own.

Major pinball tournaments have been using Aurcade's tourney engine for a couple of years now with great success. Vid tourneys like the annual ACAM Tournament too.

it's getting nerdy

revenge-of-the-nerds.jpg

we have it all done...will show soon...

Right, and that's better but still a long way from ideal. Usually when you're playing in a tournament a large bottleneck is simply waiting for tournament volunteer to come over and record who you are, what game it is, and what your score is. The time for that process really isn't affected all that much by whether it's recorded on paper it an iPad. Heaven help you if multiple people finish at the same time, you'll be there a while. Having machines self report on games where nothing special happened would cut that time out entirely, even if it's only a one machine tournament.less downtime means more entries means more money means better for everyone. And that's only the improvement I'm willing to spot in public! There are a ton of other ways the process could be improved.

Oh, I totally agree, don't get me wrong. But it would go a long way if more tourneys would simply adopt Aurcade and work with what's currently possible.

At the moment the big hurdle is games that only flash completed scores up for 3 seconds and then take 5 minutes to rotate the DMD back around to show them again. If the ref doesn't get that score the first time you're going to stand there doing nothing for too long.

It doesn't even have to be that sophisticated...rubber bands across the outlane posts and you're done.

In any case, I hope that they find a way to minimize cheating, because online play is an obvious path forward to connect players.

I'd really like to see achievements like they've got on The Pinball Arcade.

Newer machines you just hit both flippers. The worst are some 90s DMDs. I remember a flinstones that took like five minutes to cycle around.

Lately what I've been doing is I let players write down their own scores. The score isn't official until verified by the scorekeeper. This allows the official to focus more on queuing, answering questions and watching other games for shenanigans, as opposed to being a deer in the headlights waiting with pen in hand for the score to flash up again.

I give each of these score verifiers a sheet of stickers or an ink stamp. It's slightly more secure and faster than the signature method. Everyone just scribbles their signature anyway and it often involves using the game as a table to write on so the game is in a down state that much longer. I can also track the scorekeepers if there's an issue by the stickers I gave them. One guy gets football stickers another gets space ships, etc.

Sega has that with most of its games in its arcades in Japan. You get a swipe card and it tracks everything. Wins/losses, in game currency, high scores, and so on. And lots of games have a tournament feature where you program, for example, a 32-man bracket and the machine announces who is up and automatically runs a tournament and tracks the scores.

Also lots of their games are internet connected and you can adjust your account through your phone. They even have machines that are connected to social media. So if you play at a location it Tweets your location. "John Smith is now playing Pinball at Club Sega Tokyo" or whatever. And you can have it Tweet your high scores and other things.

They can even track the high scores of a game across all arcades. So if ten thousand games are played of any game across all day, Sega can see which machine had the high score, who the player was, and what time the score was achieved.

Personally I want machines to be easily updated. You press one button and it checks for the latest software and updates it. No opening up the cabinet or fiddling with dip switch or USB drives or burning roms or anything like that. And I want people to be able to custom code pinball software easily because some machines have their best versions as home roms that were community made. Give people better access to coding and rule making kits.

The cloud is just a fancy term for "we found a way to charge you more and keep charging you after purchase"

All the cool cats play at Taito anyway CAVE SHUMPS FTMFW

exactly!

it's like having 2 basketball teams, or 2 different tennis players compete on two different courts. it's impossible for it to be the same. that's why they change sides half way.. so everything is even.

i love the idea, but it's impossible. true competition must be on the same table. period.

No matter what, someone will cheat, a fix will be sent out, and it will be hacked again.

This was the funniest hack in WOW ever:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/08/world-of-warcraft-hack-hacker-thousands-killed-cities-destroyed_n_1948843.html

Guys it's just a fun gimmick, not the Olympics

They can't stop people from cheating in Scrabble on Yahoo...how is Gary Stern gonna ensure people don't cheat over the cloud?

Pretty soon someone will develop a camera kit to monitor cheaters which in turn will also be hacked.

I am not sure I want to look in on some of the people while they are playing! Who knows what you will see if it is on the player.

They are only cheating themselves, thats of course if there is no prize money etc to be won... I think it would be great for people to play each other over the net from their homes..

Dude, people try to one up each other on here every single day...do they make any money doing that?

Mother in laws try and one up their son in laws everyday...do they make any money in that?

You get my point.

It is just the competitive nature of people.

Sorry dudeeeeeee.......

The Skit-B crew are doing this with Predator.