Decided to glance at my "drain audits" today and was kind of shocked by the following:

IMDN Balls Played 573, Center Drains 561, Left Drains 7, Right Drains 5
SW Balls Played 324, Center Drains 192, Left Drains 82, Right Drains 50

Note that IMDN has a "stock" setup and SWLE has a modded left outlane (https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/stern-star-wars-clubmay-the-force-be-with-you/page/99#post-4437051). Even with the sumo post, the SW left outlane is BRUTAL.

Helps explain why IMDN games last a bit longer than SW games

snaroff

Not only a Stern thing, most games keep audit info.

The main reason I posted this was the really bizarre numbers for IMDN. 98% of drains are down the middle? Whoa.

SWLE & TRONLE are both 60% down the middle (which is much more balanced, obviously). TRONLE is the most balanced with Balls Played 3074, Center Drains 1894, Left Drains 660, Right Drains 520.

snaroff

From the factory, the right outlane is already fully open. The left peg is in the middle.

My average ball times on IMDN are ~2x SWLE or TRONLE. Haven't measured the flipper gaps, but I believe they are all the same.

My Sterns average ~60% drains down the middle, which is fairly balanced. 98% is unusual.

I wonder if other IMDN owners are seeing the same stats as far as drains down the middle. It's possible my 98% is related to how I shoot the game.

snaroff

As someone who programmed professionally for over 25 years, I can't imagine a glitch/bug that would cause this. These are simple/global/universal "counters". I can imagine them not being "wired up" or reset every so often, but then the 3 drain counters wouldn't add up to the "balls played" counter. Odd.

Unlike Eskaybee's recollection of plenty of left drains, my experience is more reflective of the numbers (though 98% center drains was still a standout...I was expecting 80-90%).

In any event, thanks for sharing your data. I'll ping Keith on this issue - if it's a bug, it will certainly not be hard to find!

snaroff

From my perspective, you'd expect center drains to be more common.

The modern Stern's I have access to (SWLE/AS/TRONLE/Beatles) all drain down the center 60-65%. The right/left drains can vary dramatically...my SWLE/Beatles left outlanes are weighted heavily.

These are all good ideas to play with...I'll try some things and report back later.

The counters are definitely wonky, but it's hard to tell what's off.

I just "hand drained" 3 balls to the right...2 were properly attributed to the right and one to the center (incorrectly). In another instance, I witnessed a right drain being attributed to the left...really weird. All of these without enabling revive or the super skill shot. I just drained 3 to the left, with all 3 being preceded by the super skill shot and the left counter only incremented by 1 (the rest being attributed to the center).

So...the bottom line is the right/left/center drain counts are unfortunately meaningless. Really hard for me to understand why the heuristics would be so complex, since a ball loss event is not very complex when compared with all the other signals/timers/etc. that pinball machines manage. You'd also think that these heuristics would be part of the system software (shared between all games).

Oh well, Keith and team will figure it out For now, I'll just ignore the audits for IMDN...

snaroff

Obviously, since it's so broken. Nevertheless, audits are really useful to help tune up a game (by adjusting the posts if a lane is too easy or brutal, for example).

Sure, but it's always nice for data & empirical to agree There are tons of settings/features that are rarely used. I imagine this will be an easy bug fix...as you said earlier, probably doesn't get much attention. Oh well...back to playing.

Looks like the new 1.06 update (just released) fixes the left/right drain system audits