I purchased a new playfield from Mirco at a show. Looked through a lot of fields to find one I thought I was satisfied with. (Least amount of key lines in the insert blacks). Waited a few weeks to install, saw some additional lines that I thought for sure were not there before. Oh well it's gotta get installed now. Game goes together. Everything lines up. One test game to make sure the game plays as intended. Literally one shot out of the scoop and a chunk of the paint comes flying off of the game. Enough of the finish plus the paint came off the of field that the ball was effected by this partial loss of the playing surface. I had previously with another field reached out to Mirco and the results of that were not in my favor so I decided to live and learn. At this point I have several titles that we would fully restore to the best of our abilities but I cannot trust all that effort to something that will as an end result, fail rather quickly. Not blaming anyone. This is not to have anyone come running to my defense. I would just rather have a decent route example with some wear than a perfect game for a few plays then be disappointed. If you look at my games on route you see then are mostly very nice examples of the games on the inside and out. I've seen a lot of collections and I would compare our route games to most nice to very nice home collections. It's all about routine maintenance for us.

This was years ago, I may have the pic on a Google drive.

I was told that I should know to put a protector on that area and that it would not be covered. He offered $100 off at the next show if it was the purchase of the same field.

I think that operators are still the majority of sales however it is closer home collectors to operators as it's ever been. I agree with just about everything you said with the exception of designed to make money. Some of these games out of the box play very very long which would not indicate they are trying to make money. I would say they are trying more than ever to make an experience for the player. Code depth is another indication that they are catering more than ever to the home environment.

We are in a great time for pinball nonetheless. I hope it continues.