I would imagine so. They had quite the Houdini display last year.

LTG : )

I’m leaning towards WOZ or MBr for my next pin. Played GOTG on location and I’m worried it will get old quick. So might finally get my first NIB pin and get it from Kingpin

Kingpin is a good dude , good choice for a distributor your first NIB purchase.

I third that. Chris is awesome and stands behind his stuff.

Chris... any idea what edition of WOZ will be on the line next? Heard Yellow Brick Road is up sometime this year, but haven’t seen pics or heard confirmation on a timeline.

Also, just to be clear, in order to get the 5% discount and free delivery (to the show) you don’t have to leave the game set up at the show, right?

From what I understand, yes. I have not been given an info on show specials as of yet though

I am only allowed to discuss machines that have been publically announced. As of now that would be the 75th anniversary editions. The 5% discount is for a "show game." The discount is given to those that allow thier machine to be used for the duration of the show. For a nib game that wasnt used for the show, the best I'm allowed to do would be to cover the shipping to the show (and technically we are not supposed to even do that.)

Looking forward to covering the show with the Pinball Mayhem crew. Also is anyone interested in playing a pinball machine while I record? The more the merrier

Jeremy Agema

I have a Star Trek Premium I'm buying through the Marco/Stern show deal. Super excited! Do I have to register my machine with the show or is that done automatically because of my order placed? What if I already bought tickets, now that I'm supposed to get tickets free, is there a way to cancel/refund the ones I bought?

Let's hope old man winter is getting everything out of his system now to leave April free and clear!

amen i remember leaving mwgc last year and driving 11 hrs home to Collingwood Ontario and the ice kept getting worse. Today is supposed brget pretty bad here.

Yeah, yeesh. This snow is killing me. Tough to get stuff done when I can never make solid plans for meetings because my kids keep ending up home with me :-/

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Kids are gonna have snow make up days well into July at this rate!

Dan, I don't see a link for bringing a machine. I assume you want this arranged ahead of time.

I am guessing I cannot do this deal on my nib Star Trek since there was a rule against installing mods for games purchased in the Marco/stern deal?

I'm looking for an Evil Knievel pinball for someone I know. If anybody has one for sale let me know.

Got another game you could bring to put the display in and move it after the show?

Not an option unfortunately. Sucks because I want the DMD for ST as it is a great mod for that game.

If Rob has them you could use your show cash to pay for a portion of a colorDMD .

That works for me!

No one is finding this so I have to rethink where to put it on the web site... You can register here!

https://www.midwestgamingclassic.com/bring-machines/

honest feedback, nothing is really intuitive to find on the website. The redesign and style are huge improvements but it take me multiple clicks to find anything I am looking for.

Not saying that you're wrong, but what is strange about that is that the actual structure of the vast majority of the site didn't change at all. There is actually nothing different about how you find the deeper pages other than the top pages were renamed, and then there were content got slightly new formatting to match the new site and that's it.

If you (or anyone) can better explain what the problem is, I can definitely relook at fixing it better, but I'm personally lost on what to try to fix. The oddest one to me is we get someone stating they can't find hotel information at least once a week, and it's at the top of every page on desktop and the first menu item on mobile. I'd love to have more people find it, but I don't know how to make it more obvious.

Site is for sure a huge improvement and really looks good. Just think small tweaks to refine would help people navigate.

I would make it so that top bar stays on the page. That way when you scroll down the bar is still frozen up top on your window.
Visually that bar does not seem to stick out to me as the buttons to press to navigate to where I want to go.

Other example is that I was trying to tell someone about Tom Taylor and how it is an option to do on Friday. It took me a while to figure out that was under attend and special events.

Last thing is possibly more details on sub pages or drop down windows to direct you on where to buy tickets for certain things. I like that I can click compete and sort by pinball. Then I click on Pingolf and it is not clear to me that I need a Preview pass to play in that, cross link to purchase/attend page, and that it only happens on Friday night.

again, all just small tweaks.

I don't think the site needs sticky navigation, I feel like the issue is more the way the site navigates between pages and how to get between details about the show. I do agree with the more content statement. It honestly took me about 10 minutes to find the 'compete' part you were talking about because the only place to find it is off the homepage. I expected it to be under 'Play'. I guess I don't expect a ton of information off the homepage past general info about the show -- when is it, where is it, and drive into the site. The new site is way better, but something still feels.....off....when navigating around it. Maybe I can run it by some ux people I know to get some feedback on it. I think the site needs minor tweaks at this point, as it's a lot better than it previously was; just needs more ironed out.

good suggestions

I can add a "compete" button under the "play" button series too, which isn't a bad idea at all.

Getting off into the weeds for a second here, we're actively trying to do a few things with the site that I do sort of want to point out and give reasons for...

First, on the topic of content - I'm not sure what you mean here, so I may be answering something that isn't what you intended and if that is so, sorry! But...

Starting a few years ago, we have been on a quest to remove and "generalize" as much of the content as possible. This was for a few different reasons, all of which are important for us:

1) So many people feed us content super late, it causes the site to come together at the very very last minute, and becomes super stressful. Less content means that we're not spending hours the final weeks leading up to the show wrangling and frantically trying to update content. This also allows us to announce things earlier, and then we can worry about the timing of it later.

2) Perhaps more importantly, we found out that basically no one actually ever read the content before. A couple years ago to try to see what people were really caring about, we went and really reviewed the analytics, and found that some of the deeper pages where we had a lot of the information were viewed by almost no one. In one case, we made a page that was seen by a grand total of about 10 people. That made that content for all practical purposes really silly to do.

3) Along with this, it was our goal to create as much flat, "three click" design as possible. In the past, we had content as deep as 9 clicks away from the front page (that was the case in the page that ten people saw, for instance).

4) Finally, one of our goals was to go much more image heavy as it allowed people to really "see" the show. We have the difficulty of trying to convey what the show is when it is fifty different things put together.

Hopefully, that helps to explain what we're doing with it and directions we do and don't want to go.

The biggest change happened in the tickets page because we had a lot of complaints about how much you had to go through and how confusing it was. We stole the general concept for this style from the Wizard World series of events, but then tried flattening it to better fit what we had before. None of the things actually changed categories (Tom's was in Special Events before, it still is), but I do agree that it is a little more difficult to find things since we aren't *forcing* people through the process... but at the same time, we have had far less complaints about the process being too long and confusing.

I'm all ears for ideas. I have the add the Compete button to the Play one as one of my ideas.

I will also say this - I'm not personally positive that the "Verb Buttons" are obvious enough as places to go get information. The problem is that they are more obvious I think on Mobile (they are in the top menu there), but it seems no one finds the top menu. Since "Hotels" is the biggest problem I have heard about now and it's heavily featured on both mobile and desktop (and actually changed from the Verb "Stay" to "Hotels" to try to be *even more obvious* after launch, which hasn't seemed to help), I don't know that placing more up there is the answer.

I'm all ears. As always, I can't do every idea at once, but I'm open to any further ones that people might have. Probably best to email me (or contact me through here) so I can keep them straight, and I don't need to devolve this thread into a huge "hey, let's revise the MGC" site thread, but I'm happy if you want to post them here too

The only feedback I have is that I couldn't find out if I had to register my NIB demo game I am buying through stern/marco in order to get the "bringing a game" benefits. And once done, how do I pick either the free show admission or the $20 show cash?

Well, it looks like Dan and I have found the source of my confusion the past two years, with lack of e-mail activity when I tried to book the show.
Somewhere I seem to have had a spam filter turned on within my e-mail.

Working on the booth details now, may even bring a game or three too, since I'll have a helper along for the ride.

I'm also working to branch into a new (non-pinball) area of business, so if your a PC Simulation type, I'll at least have a small prototype on display. May even have some pre-production things for sale.

-Hans

MIDWEST GAMING CLASSIC SHOW PRICE ON CGC Games Contact me if interested, The show games will be provided my myself and KingpinGames
Save 500.00 on a game used in the show

Attack from Mars Classic Edition $5500.00 show price
Attack from Mars Special edition $6800.00 show price
Monster Bash Classic Edition $5500.00 show price
Monster Bash Special Edition $6800.00 show price

Rules: Game will be shipped directly to the Midwest Gaming Classic and used for the showfrom April 12-14th. Game can not be picked up until 5pm on Sunday the 14th. Game must be paid for in advance to place the order.

Last year, Show games averaged around 300-400 plays. You will get a full weekend pass to the show, including the Saturday night after party.

Is that the "out the door" price or will there be tax on top?

Somethings shouldn't be said out loud . . . (not saying this is even one of those things . . .)

**sorry, didn't mean to bump this a week later. I'm not sure how I ended up here thinking this was a recent post.

that's sound advice. i sent the same message about a week ago.

Whoa, lot of people who make pinball machines are coming this year. I thought last year we had a lot... I think I just got a list with more people on it than we have announced on our site so far...

Is this an announcement for an announcement?

No, because I have no idea when I'll announce this! . It takes a lot to gather and find all those pics!

While I'm here, we've got like ten tickets for Tom Taylors open house left! I don't know why, last year we sold out of the same number of tickets by December 1st. They can be found under special events if you want them, it's a great collection with more than 300 playable machines (347 playable pinball machines last I spoke to him!) and is available Friday before the show. You can drop off your game if you're bringing one either before or after the time too!

I'm going to have a soldering tutorial table on the Saturday feel free to bring me dead Stern node boards!

Build a test fixture to help identify problem areas on those boards

How late can you purchase tickets online?

Is Tom Taylor's included in the do everything pass? May be a dumb questions, maybe I can't read?

No, the do everything pass is just onsite. Tom Taylor's is actually limited to just 100 people. VIG is around 300 that we can handle.

Depends on what it is for.

Saturday and Sunday we usually close sales for on the Wednesday night before the show.

Friday usually sells out late March. It seems to be closer because of VIG right now, however.

VIG we've never done like this before, and it's really hard to tell. A couple weeks ago, we were doing 10+ tickets a day. The last few days have been like 2. So... between a few days and four weeks from now I expect it will sell out.

Tom's usually sells out by December, so I don't know what's up there.

Hope that helps! If it is possible for you to purchase earlier, we do appreciate that, as it does help us to afford more cool stuff earlier on

Ben, if you need, I can bring just various boards to have people practice on. I have plenty of old revision and other oddball unsoldered blanks I can donate to the cause.

Kingpin is an almost mythic game to pinball collectors and players, and the team at Circus Maximus are finally putting it into production so everyone can see what they are missing with this Mark Ritchie designed game. Come give it a play at the Wisconsin Center April 12-14 to see what all the fuss is about!

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Okay, now i have a reason to come to the show. Thanks dan.

Sure. I will be doing a session in the BitBuilt area on Saturday.

Oddly enough, this Kingpin is also almost mythical to pinball collectors and players.

John Borg is coming, because he makes awesome games!

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Brian Eddy is also coming, because he makes great games too!

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