Like Mcvetyty mentioned, you need a nice bouncy post rubber on the right side of the orb slot to help slow and bounce the ball over to the magnet properly. Only the Cliffy ones seem to work well, but they kind of wear out quick - so order a few if you decide to try it. Carbon-core balls help as well.
https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/guardians-of-the-galaxy-owners-thread/page/98#post-6043176</blockquote
For those of you modifying your magnet with washers underneath the playfield, adding bigger rubber posts, changing pitch, etc., did you try a different node board 9 first? I know there seems to be so many fixes for the magnet and I just want to throw a new node board into the mix as a potential fix.
I don't know if some of you saw my post from the other day but I have a brand new 2022 build of GOTG Pro. The Node board 9 that came with my game is defective, some sort of short that dims and powers down the back half of the playfield randomly.
Anyway the magnet grabs hard each time it exits the orb (unless the orb gets stuck, I have that issue to unfortunately). During Groot multi ball the magnet diverts the balls in different directions. Whenever the magna force light is lit it grabs the balls and flings them in different directions randomly. Sometimes it pulls the balls and they sort of float for a minute and change trajectory gently and other times you can see them being pushed and spun really fast, its really cool. Pretty much works just like the promotional video of the machine when it was first released. So I figured I got lucky and got a good magnet at least.
However when a tech was out at my house to diagnose the short I have he switched my node board for one he had that came from an older machine to test in order to see if the short was coming from node board 9. So it fixed the short but broke the magnet. It literally worked 0% of the time just from a node board change. Same SD card with factory 1.11 code. Nothing else was touched or modified. The magnet didn't do crap with his node board but it fixed the back half of the playfield shorting out.
We played several games and we were fixated on the magnet and literally trying to get it to grab. During Groot multi ball the balls just all go straight down the middle. It didn't grab at all out of the orb or when magna force was lit. The playfield was warm to the touch however. Even intentionally just taking the balls and putting them over the magnet it just refused to grab them like it did with my node board. My first thought was something shorted out and broke the magnet and now I have to get a new one from Stern along with my other laundry list of items.
When he put my node board back in that came with the machine to my surprise, the magnet was fixed and grabbed the ball hard 100% of the time (unless the orb drop target gets stuck of coarse) but I still have the short where it shuts down the back half of the playfield randomly. I did some more test after he left with the playfield off. Magnet was diverting out of grout multi ball, magna force and of course whenever the orb decides to work when the ball comes out of the orb it will get stuck on the magnet for a few seconds and whip around before being released.
So I'm patiently waiting for a new node board along with some other things. Still trying to get all this BS fixed but the magnet thing is pretty wild that it behaves completely different just from a node board swap. It literally changes the entire dynamic of that game with it not working.
I just find that extremely odd and curious how many others might have switched node board 9 and if they are seeing the same thing I'm seeing? I'm in IT for a living and I've seen odd behavior with computers. Since this node board is pretty much just a computer if these are shitty components then maybe that is the root to all these problems.
I don't know who manufactures Stern's node boards and who designs the software but maybe they need to switch lol. Maybe they could work with Nvidia or AMD for further Pinball machines lol.