I haven't had the opportunity to play the game yet but this was always my concern and seems like it could have been an easy tweak and really speed the game up. Too bad it didn't make the revision list.

I only watched a few minutes of the new stream but I caught Eric referring to balls being damaged and turned to sand paper. Was it damage from the rings? Is that the real issue? Not that the rings themselves don't work, but that they were damaging balls and that can cause some pretty epic damage to a playfield?

More an indictment to how bad the DI reveal was, and then how it became a sleeper hit.

Well, I'll speak to what I said, referring to it as a "sleeper hit".

If I look up the definition of that term, wikipedia defines it as:

"In the entertainment industry, a sleeper hit is a title (such as a book, film, song or game) that becomes successful gradually, often with little promotion."

So, by their definition, we're talking about successful. It doesn't necessarily have to light the world on fire, but was it a success for JJP? As opposed to a money loser. It also started slow out of the gate and built fans as more people played it.

I don't think all LEs and CEs have to sell out for it to be a success, and anecdotally we know it has had decent sales.

I think that was exactly how Jack pitched it at Expo when it was announced.

Considering David has been a hired gun working for every pinball company (except Stern at the moment which chooses not to work with him because hes been taking other work), obviously Deeproot threw some real money at him to lock him up. David is great, but we've seen this story before of pinball startups throwing money around all over the place before they've shipped a product. Too bad David will be taken away from the actual pinball world during this time.

I highly doubt they'll do that again. POTC sucked the air away from Dialed In, the game they actually had for sale (and were producing). I suspect any pinball company would rather sell actual machines than take pre-orders.

Yeah it happened, but don't think we'll be seeing a new JJP game at Expo this year while the current titles find an audience.