It's only confusing because you've been trained to do something counter intuitive.

Think about it this way, if you were a new player and you walked up to a game with two buttons on a side, within one game you'd figure out how to operate both the lower and upper flippers independently.

If that same new player walked up to a standard game with a single button to control both flippers. They could play that game 100 times and not realize they could control both flippers independently. Single buttons are typically On/Off switches, it is not intuitive that they have different trigger points based on how far the button is pressed.

I'm not making that argument at all.

I was responding to the users comment which specifically argued that 'Two buttons is confusing'.

I completely disagree with that statement.

I've met people who own games where staging is important, and they didn't even realize it was a trick you could do. I've also played people at league who just found out about it. These are people who have played hundreds or thousands of games and still didn't figure out staging on their own.

Why is this, because an arcade button being able to be pressed at different pressures being able to perform different actions is surely more confusing.

The only reason a single flipper button to control two flippers independently is less confusing to top tier players is because they've been forced to learn something that is counter intuitive.

That is the same argument though. Those people got used to pinball machines having two buttons to operate every flipper on a game. They've been trained to do the counter intuitive thing.

Assuming you want the user to be able to operate each flipper independently, in my eyes, the clearest way to do this for someone who has never touched the game is to provide a button for each flipper.

I think the keyboard we type on is a good comparison. As most people know, the whole QWERTY layout of keys found on most keyboards was designed to be very inefficient and intentionally slow down people on typewriters to prevent them from locking up their keys. It's a very counter intuitive layout, but it's standard at this point, that it's almost impossible to get rid of it. To say an alphabetically arranged keyboard is confusing is not taking in account how confusing the normal keyboard really is, you've just become use to it.

The imperial system of measurement would be another good example.

That is why I specifically said, "Assuming you want the user to be able to operate each flipper independently".

If your objective is to make the game as easy as possible for someone who has never played the game to play. For a new player, two buttons is excessive as we all know any new player instinctively just wants to trigger all the flippers at the same time.

My Summertime game which is an early flipper title is wired so that both the left and right flippers fire regardless of which button is pressed. One button for all flippers is easiest to figure out.

I personally think people are capable of figuring how to use an extra button. It would take time, just like it takes time to learn how to use two buttons separately. That is just part of getting better. Most people who play my WCS94 don't even realize there is another button for magna save. When they figure that out it just becomes another fun element to master.

It is not much different than Sterns middle button. New players don't know when to use it, they don't get that there are rules to the game, they just bash a ball around without it and have fun. As they start to figure out how to keep the ball in play for more than 2 seconds.

Don't get me wrong, I've played the P3, and thought the upper flipper being on a separate button was awkward. That being said, I fully expect if I played it more I'd begin to prefer that approach over the norm.