Thank you for making the distinction between own and other's games. I treat my own stuff WAY harder than I would ever do with someone else's games.

Agree 100%. I do generally tighten up my tilts for tournaments and for TPF, but at one specific location we use, the guy generally has NO TILT BOBS AT ALL. I'm sure it was a shock to some of our regulars to find these games giving tilt warnings at our last tourney. I brought tilt bobs from home lol..

Only once have I ever been accused of being too rough with games, and that was by someone I'm pretty sure had absolutely no clue who I was at the time they said it, and I'm the guy that's known to do slide saves and be able to walk a ball up an outlane on several occasions without tilting.

There's all types at shows, and if you don't want to take the risk, then don't. It's not worth saving 50$ on a weekend pass to have your game abused or broken IMO. It already costs far more to rent a U-haul and move games than I get benefits by taking my game to TPF. I had some clear chipped last year and that's more than going to negate the benefit that I got in exchange for bringing my game.

The only issue I see with a good slap save is people wearing rings. I wear a tungsten wedding band that would leave a very hefty dent in a game if I slap saved with my left hand. I either make it a point to secure my ring somewhere if I even remotely think I might have to slap save with my left hand, or I just don't slap on that side. Always wonder about other people doing that though..

Right, because most people are intently observing non-tournament players, right? Observer error. Almost everyone I've ever seen in the TPF tournament area is far more respectful of the games than people that are out on the floor......never seen anyone pick up and drop a game in the tournament area there, as opposed to what several people told me was done to my Space Shuttle the first year I took it, lol.

Even on location last week, I saw someone doing the ol' PALM SLAM ball launch on a brand new TWD, it's like yeah, you moron, you know there's a spring there for a reason right, and it's not to protect your hand.

I'm not, but I don't think that casual players are being watched nearly as closely, which probably leads to a vast disparity of seen vs. unseen behavior. I don't hover over all my games at TPF, I'm in the tournament area or playing pinball.

No, the solution is still to have a tight tilt.

Guarantee you that if someone had shoved a game hard enough to bend a leg at TPF, they would've been removed from the gameroom and disqualified from the tournament..

People that can't contain themselves, especially repeatedly, need to be ejected, end of story. Also, a tighter tilt may cause them to tilt-through on the next player, which is definitely an automatic disqualify anywhere that's respectable. Nobody's perfect, and yeah, sometimes extremely tight tilts don't behave as expected. At most I would give these people one warning, and that's assuming they did no actual harm to the game.

That said, my wife will shake the crap out of Metallica and I've very literally hurt myself on the games I have at home (AND the games laughed at me as I did it....completely undamaged.) in frustration...have yet to have ever damaged them, so I really just don't get these mongoloids you guys are talking about. I'm a pretty bulky dude and if I've never even so much as dinged a lockdown bar...these guys must be freakin' Hercules to do stuff like bend legs!

I tried to do a bangback once on my STTNG, slammed my palm into the raised edge of the coin door instead of the lockdown bar or the cabinet...

Really?

I mean, we do it at home as kind of a F YOU to the game itself after a really brutal drain, but....lol @ the idiot intentionally losing points in any way in a tournament....would never even occur to me to use that to get the bob swinging to screw with other people. Unreal.