(Topic ID: 176347)

Ideas for how to help boost location pinball?

By Whysnow

7 years ago


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    #63 7 years ago

    Pinball industry veteran Roger Sharpe shared some of his ideas how to increase pinball play on location in Pinball Magazine No. 1...

    3 months later
    -1
    #129 6 years ago

    Here’s a new angle to look at how to boost pinball on location: take out the stuff that makes the games annoying and make them challenging again.

    I grew up playing pinball that was hard on the player: no tilt warnings, no ball saves, no pity multiball on ball 3, certainly no endless ball saves on every ball and multiball and a lot of random ball movement (not every shot was spoonfed to the flippers). Stuff you had to build up would on some games reset on every ball, so you had to start over. Games were designed to have short ball times (good for operators), but still offered a challenge and were fun to play.

    Personally I never liked the pity multiball everyone could get on ball 3 on most Data East and Sega games, although Williams used it too on occasion. I feel it takes away the challenge of getting to multiball and as such it takes away part of the fun. There was also the pity extra ball if you had a few short balls, which is different as it extends your game, but doesn’t spoil or award any features. So those remained a challenge. I also stayed away from games with repetitive voice calls like LW3 and others.

    Gary Stern has said on multiple occasions he wants an average player to see everything the game has to offer on his first game. I say that is killing pinball on location. If there’s no challenge left, why play again? So the game got the first quarter because the theme seemed interesting. It lost the rest of the quarters because the game turned out to be boring or no challenge at all.

    So in order to boost pinball on location it would be interesting to see whether games will be more fun / earn better when the operator adjusted the game so that ballsave times are set to a reasonable time, mutiball ballsave time is set to a minimum or zero, the pity multiball on ball 3 is eliminated so achieving multiball is challenging again, maybe even reset certain features on each ball instead of carry them over. When players have more fun playing the game, they’re likely to spend more money on it playing it.

    Sure, some games have their limits in to what the operator can adjust. Then maybe such a game isn’t the best game to operate? If the goal is to boost pinball play on location, one should look at how a game is most fun to play and very often that is not by operating it on the factory settings. It will take some game knowledge from the operator, but I'm confident it will pay off for both the operator as for pinball on location.

    #132 6 years ago
    Quoted from LTG:

    Wasn't that Eugene Jarvis input from the Avatar days ?

    I recall Gary telling me that Eugene strongly advised against showing the Iron Monger on Iron Man as it should surprise the player. Gary decided to have it raised during attract mode as a "teaser".

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