I treat the top 100 as the siren calling to the newbs to be saved.

I treat it as an exact factual statement. It tells me what games I have to like and if I think I like something that is not highly ranked it lets me know that I'm wrong and that I actually do not like that game after all.

Sound thinking. I once thought I liked SEGA pins, but..... They're not top 100 material, evidently... They suck! How wrong I was.

The top 100 list on pinside tells me how close I am to reaching nirvana.

Yeah, good thing you came to pinside and figured that out. A couple of weeks ago I thought I was having fun on Goldeneye. Turns out I was really having a bad time and playing a bad game. I would have never known otherwise.

I just want to fit in so I look at the top 10 pins and then I rate them exactly the score given by the top 100 list.

Top 100 is based on people’s opinions of their experience. Some rate a game after 1 play, some after 100 plays and some rate games without even playing. It is what it is. Try not to take too much stock in it and/or take ratings to heart. That said, I’m pretty sure the top 100 would be a much better place without people like Whysnow but what can you do that the moderators won’t? It is what it is.

Alcohol

Pills

Acid

There's a top 100?

yeah, top 100 is great when filled with people that only rate DMDs

Halarious

Hey.. Funhouse is top 30!!!

Oh he meant WPC era

rating games I’ve only played a dozen times or so isn’t my style.

yeah, we know... You dont really have the play base to properly rate games when you have limited your experience to only 1 era from the past 7 decades of pinball.

It would probably be best for all of us if you just deleted your rankings all together. They are all rubish anyway.

POTW right there

Isn’t that kind of the point of this thread

now you get it!

Publicly Owned Treatment Works? Patient Of The Week? Google's not helping me out on this one ...

Post of the week

Penis On The Window. Geeze.....

I know it's not perfect, but I thought adding a price filter for the custom lists would be a good way to produce a list of machines within your price range. The bang for your buck used to be more useful, but now it's pretty much all EMs. Not saying they aren't a good bang for your buck, but it would be nice to find a list of just early-SS or DMD machines.

That cold glass is refreshing.

Please throw a potato at me if I ever waste my time ranking a pinball machine, because I sure as heck ain't wasting my time reading the rankings.

You get some sour cream and chives with that potato for taking the time to respond to this thread.

I think the Top 100 is basically a fairly accurate representation of the overall general sentiment towards those games. For what it aims to do, it does a fine job.

But my question to the OP is why on Earth do you believe a bunch of strangers' opinions are more valid than your own? Do you really think averaging together hundreds of peoples' ratings results in anything meaningful? Ask yourself why you need the validation of having some online chart reinforce your own preferences.

This is kind of an unpopular opinion, but I like the Top 100. For someone who's new to pinball and doesn't know a lot of machines, the Top 100 is a great resource for figuring out what games are generally highly regarded by lots of people. It's fun to mentally check off all those top games as you get a chance to play them, and to form your own opinion of them.

But once you've had the opportunity to play those games yourself, then the ratings and rankings serve almost no purpose. You've played it. What's the use of reading, let alone worrying about, some random stranger's opinion of the game? Do you really value mass consensus over your own insights?

Personally, I'm not a huge fan of mass consensus. Do you really think it's the absolute best people on Earth who tend to win elections in general?

It's particularly poor at determining the "best" in subjective or artistic fields. I think most people agree that it's rarely if ever the very best songs in the world that top the charts. And if a song you like doesn't reach the top of the charts -- does that affect how much you like that song?

Just look at the Top 100 list for what it is: one way to slice a bunch of ratings data. It's neither total bunk nor any kind of definitive anything.

Agreed. I found it useful when I was first getting into pinball, the Top 100 and the Bang/Buck lists led me to buy a Shadow, and I can't say that was anything but an excellent outcome. Now that I've been playing a while I never look at it unless I'm reading one of these "The Top 100 List Sucks" threads. But newbies doing Google searches on pinball will run into it, and can then also read the written reviews which are often much more useful. And maybe they'll wander into Pinside and learn a thing or two here as well.

Also, having the written reviews attached to the numeric rankings and the Top 100 list probably gets at least a few more people reading and writing reviews, which is a good thing.

So keep the list right where it is, it serves its purpose even if 90% of the people that read this thread never look at it anymore.

[EDIT: Wait a minute, Shadow is no longer in the Top 25?!? These rankings are bullshit.]

Nailed it.

Aren't those the people we are supposed to try to impress?

To be fair, the best people on Earth never run in those elections.

Even if someone only rates EM games I don't see the issue

YouTube has sold me on buying a game I haven't played first hand 100% more often than any top 100 list.

The problem with ratings is it is subjective based on the raters experience. So to solve that just normalize the rating of each game by the average rating that person has given.... thus if a person rates 10 games all 10, then 10 is the average rating that person gives, so in actually, it would show up as a 5 across the board, or that all those games are just meh...

I do look at ratings when a new game comes on the market locally but reading the reviews is what sways me.....

This.