Wow, Pinside sure has become bitcher's heaven of late.

As to this original MASSIVE debacle, I do believe there is truth in the original statements. Why do I believe this? Because there is a Woz Standard sitting in my basement that was ONE OF THESE machines.

Dealer up in Omaha NE (no, not Bene) had a bunch of LE orders placed with JJP day 1. After all of the long delays and the Standard was announced, he switched some of his LE orders to Standards and yes, his remaining LE orders got bumped way down the list.

He got in three Woz Standards this way mid July, myself and another friend from KC drove up and bought two of them on July 22nd, 2013.

So no, it's not "bullshit" as the physical result of this is sitting in my basement.

Woznumber_(resized).jpg

Pictures or it didn't happen right? I have yet to see one

Well seeing you quoted me, I'm not bitching at all. Mark called Jack a liar, and since then it appears to me that Jvspin has edited his original post, unless I simply missed what he said, and the two people that quoted him selected to not quote his full post, which I guess is possible.

He said:

Mark quoted that and said:

Any time I ask Mark for a qualification on something, I'm bitching? These posts indicate to me that Mark is saying the story you are saying is a lie and that Jack and the distributor made it up.

And really, I don't even care. I would have completely ignored it, but Mark called Jack a liar directly. And when you call someone a liar like that, and you are saying you know the exact circumstances, you might want to back it up. If you want to call that bitching, then yes, I'm a bitcher.

The most ONTOPIC post in a Hobbit Update thread in a long time!

Is JJP back to work yet or still on break?

What I Frankly Still Don't understand in all this Story, is why his remaining LE orders got bumped down instead of holding their rightfull place in the order list

Ok, let me explain that to the best of my understanding. I'm a distributor and I order 10 LE games on day 1. My order is in and I sell all 10 quickly. Now it is day 100 and they announce the standard model. I already sold my LEs, but if it takes 6 months to get those standards, maybe the machine isn't "hot" anymore. So I tell Jack I'll order 10 more, but I need them quick... Seeing the LEs are sold I get Jack to swap my two orders. I get 10 standards to sell quickly while the game is hot, and I screw the 10 people that already bought the LEs from me.

So when Jack is building me games, he is building me standards. The only people I hopped in line were my own customers. 10 games get built during day 1 orders, just not the 10 my customers expected. I sell them quickly because the game is hot, and I make more money.

That has been my understanding of what happened for a long time. If it's wrong, feel free to correct me. Overall, it is pretty shady and a raw deal for people that paid for games and got them a lot later than they should have. No idea how many distributors did it, but it seemed like enough to really screw up the line as people waiting for games got pushed back. No idea if Pinball Sales did it as well, but if they did, it would be a pretty big conflict of interest.

I see, but cant believe a decent dealer, nor Jack Can't behavior like that. First of all the dealer is basically betraying the trust of his customers, who paid, not only for the game, but for a fast delivery too. If this would be discovered, it would be the end for the dealer. Second, if Jack has agreed to this, that I frankly doubt, hes not better than the the dealer, Or maybe I'm too innocent and this is how pinball business works ... what a crap

that would essentially be like you prepay to be the last to get your pinball machine. Doesn't seem right at all

That's precisely what happened...then Ruby Red's came out years later and were built and delivered BEFORE the LEs were! You can't make it up.

I wonder what problem jack is having with the line now. He showed pf's being populated, but you'd think by now that he'd be showing completed games being tested

I gave them a bigger benefit of the doubt with the belief distributors still had unsold LE's they preordered early. After seeing distributors like Automated have NIB LE games for sale long after they are supposedly "sold out", I now take "sold out" to mean that all LE's are pre-sold to distributors but not necessarily to end customers.

In this scenario, they would change unsold, pre-ordered LE's to Standards. Then move the unsold LE's to the end of the line. This way, no line jumping occurs.

I think he may have misspoke as I don't see why his remaining LE's would move to the end of the line, only the LE's that were replaced by Standards should have been moved to the end of the line.

I don't know, take your pick

A: vendor going slow shipping parts.
B: The holidays slowed things down
C: Lack of money to buy the parts needed

Either way he owes the preorder people some kinda update for the new year. Its been a little too long since any updates were made.

The December 18th update was pretty good. In it he stated "The plan is to build a number of games for further extensive testing and then go into full production in January.". I would expect something in the next couple weeks. It is only the 2nd business day of January, after all...

The next update may very well be (and hopefully) that games are shipping. The time for "drop target mechs have been built" type updates has past. Let's see these games get out the door.

Are those investors still on board?

Think again, update just more parts. A few Smaug heads.

10649461_1103778259640769_90627423127582391_n_(resized).jpg

Well....they do look good at least

We're getting close'ish'? So excited!

From all the updates we've seen (cabinets, red Smaugs, etc.), my sense is that the LEs will be built before the SEs. Any thoughts?

Either way, I'm getting pumped for what looks to be an epic pin!

I believe they stated when it was offered to switch from LE to SE that your build order stayed the same and you didn't lose your place in line. I don't see a reason they can't have both models on the same line.

Considering the ones that will ship first are to show off/tests units then it would have to be the LE considering they haven't sold all of them. SE are all allocated I think.

During production I'm guessing they can swap from 1 to another pretty quick since there isn't a massive difference.

I have a feeling we won't see Hobbit's leaving the building for another few months. Just an opinion but I hope I'm wrong.

Sigh.

That's all.
Just "Sigh."

Well ... I see eight smaug mechs ... that I presume are for the eight enginering units that are being made ... so no great news .. just as expected.

I'm not sure. I don't know if they make them in the exact order date sequence or in batches. They may do a week of LEs and then a week of SE's - and go back and forth until the SE's are done - and then just do LE/Standards? Who knows. But I would think they would try to batch up the different versions to be more efficient and productive?

Just guessing - or in other words just 'talking out my ass'.

So what's a reasonable street price delivered for a standard edition?

Unless I'm wrong I believe the Standard is now $8000 + shipping. And that's a real price, not a fake MSRP.

If it's less someone let me know!!

Damn, I thought that was MSRP. Waaay out of my reach. It's gonna be a great game, guess I'll just have to play on location.

I think that is right. It is a ton of dough, but I don't think JJP can sell if for much less - that game is rather packed to be honest. In my opinion anyway

Once they start building games have they given an estimate on how long it will take to build them? I thought I remember WOZ taking right around a year to make 1000 of them with a few extra standards mixed in. Also, is it 1500 LEs plus all the SE's? If so that's got to be well over 2000 games. Even if they double the production rate of WOZ you'd still be looking at over a year.-or has production capacity increases significantly more than that?

The game is amazing and is truly packed with feautures and is worthy of an $8k price.. If LEs were $8k and I could order one and have it within a month (guaranteed) I would buy one. The problem is by the time all the games get made and you can buy one without pre-ordering the price will likely be $9.5k plus like WOZ. I could justify 7.5-8k but not more than that.

I posted this on the other thread, but probably more eyes here.

Just before Xmas I put in a pre-order for the LE on the JJP website. Jen emailed me right away and said that based on current timetables I would be looking to get my game around May/June, but that could change...

I don't mind the wait right now, but I can always get my deposit back if I choose, and I don't have to pay the rest until my particular game is ready to ship.

I re-watched one of the expo talks last night.
Jack said back in July that they had sold about 1500 units.
Don't think they can make 1500 pins + all orders since then and deliver it all in 5 months.

Well it depends how many games they can make in a day when going at full steam. Stern has the capability of doing around 100 machines a day. Let's say JJ can do 20 in a day (and I hope they can at least do that if not more), then that would take 75 working days to make 1500.

I find it hard to believe that if JJP can't even figure out when production will BEGIN - they can even remotely offer an estimate on delivery for a brand new order.

I hope you get your machine exactly as promised, but their track record in this area (telling the truth about delivery and/or even having a handle on it) would make me incredibly skeptical. If I had to bet money on when new orders will be delivered, I'd be picking a date that ended in a 17...and I don't mean June17.

I hope I'm wrong....(there's a first time for everything).

The good news is, whenever you DO get the game, it looks like it will be gorgeous! Congrats!

And that's all I really care about, I waited until I saw what the final version looked like with some gameplay. I'm sure if I jumped in 2 years ago that my mindset would be completely different.

I think the wait starts getting hard when others get it way before you. See the MMr thread.

I wouldn't put too much faith in the "when" from JJP only that indeed you will receive your game. They are notoriously optimistic as to dates.

Has anyone got an estimate from JJP later than June 2016 for an LE/SE game? Hard to believe they'll have all 1500-2000 games done by then but I would love to have them prove me wrong!

It appears that JJP has built their test games. It seems to me that until the results of testing these games are in, nobody can be sure of a start date. That's the point of doing these tests. If all goes well, we can expect production to begin soon with a slow ramp up to full capacity. I have no inside info; that's just what I think is likely.

But what if they find problems with some of these test games?

Odss are these aren't really test machines but will be going to the biggest distribs in hopes of selling more hobbits (more money down to fund things.) It makes zero sense, outside of the lawsuit, that hobbit is taking this long to produce past a fully realized machine. Which we've all seen for months. Any play right now is to get more rev to build more machines. If money weren't an issue a bunch of people would have machines by now.

If there ARE problems- you'd best hope they DO find them in those games.

Think how nice it would have been had they found the light board design flaw in the WoZ prototypes...

One day I would like to know why JJP went with the serial light chain design. Such a basic design 101 violation introducing thousands of single points of failure in a critical system. One bad component or wire on one bulb and poof, the game is down. Couple the faulty design with flaky leds components and you have a real mess on your hands. TH has certainly benefited from the lessons learned on WoZ. Let's hope it's a solid performer. Heaven knows JJP has taken enough time to get it right.

I'm not an electrical engineer or anything like that so I don't know a lot, but I can tell you it is very, very easy to isolate a bad light board in a WOZ, and simply "remove" it from the chain, leaving all other boards fully operational. Once you get a the new light board, you're back in business quickly. Neighbor has a WOZRR and it is extremely simply to replace a bad board, should you need to. YMMV

Yes simple to replace a board but wouldn't it be easier to just replace a bulb(LED)?