You mean like this:

http://www.sternpinball.com/Games/pinball-redemption-kit.aspx

Stern currently sells them. I also see options in the setups of my 90's Bally/Williams games where I can set ticket redemption options. So the idea has been around for a while.

As bdaily mentioned, they already have it.

There are a couple problems though.

1. Currently, their payout table is too low (which leads into #2). Games need to be spitting out 10-50 tickets for normal non-pingeek play.

2. Pinball really is a skill game. The new claw machines don't operate on skill alone. They can change their grip strength based on their actual payouts. The payout logic in pins needs to somehow take that into account. If you have ace players coming in and consistently dumping out hundreds upon hundreds of tickets per game, that's not a good thing either.

There are a lot more, but I'll just start with those.

kids want to put a coin in, watch something happen for 2 seconds, then collect their tickets.

MAYBE you put a pin into "chuck e cheese mode", where the ball automatically plunges upon coin (no start button), 1 ball, it bounces, they can flip, but maybe not, and then tickets come out. 1 ball game over. no ball save time.

The scary thing is, I think I've got something there.

I totally agree with you! this make perfect sense to me...if a pinball wizard plays he only has one ball to do his damage...

For pinball to work as a redemption game, we have to go back to flipperless pins and only give the player 1-2 balls. It's a wild crazy world.

-Wes

At Marvin's the Tron Pro is using the new Stern ticket system. It is working well and the game is getting significantly more plays. Both from kids and their parents. The parents will play it to win tickets for their kids while the kids are playing the 10 second kiddie casino games.

The new system is very flexible and will automatically adjust to give out an average number of tickets per game. Or you can set fixed score based payouts. You can have the game give out few tickets or well over 100 if you want. Much Much better than the previous systems.

There are specific call outs and DMD images when tickets are awarded also.

You can (and we do) set it to give some tickets as soon as the game starts. We also set the auto plunger on. So if a kids starts a game, takes his tickets, and walks away - the game will end by itself in about 1 minute. Most kids are learning to keep playing to win more tickets. Bottom line is this is getting more kids to play and significantly increasing pinball play by the young and old.

I hope this will get pinball back into all the family amusement centers that are running redemption.

Parker

Skeeball is a skill based game and it works as redemption, but that's cause no matter how good you are there's only so many points you can get.

You would have to make redemption mode 1 ball per token, no extra balls, no replays (xb and specials can be bonus ticket awards), and you would have to have a maximum amount that can be won (get to a certain score and the game says "YOU WIN!" gives you a "jackpot" of tickets and then shuts the flippers down.

time to start a new pinball company

Good ideas guys.

I know myself i will not take my daughter to arcades anymore. After looking around and realizing that most if not all of the games there were some type of gambling game. I have no interest in teaching my four year old about gambling. Not to mention the last time i went i was doing my high stakes mall gambleing (lol) on the coin pusher machine and a whole bunch of quarters fell and nothing came out. They had the machine rigged to cycle them back in, it payed out nothing you won, i was very upset.

A lot of pins has had this in their software since the mid 1990's. And companies have made ticket dispensers you could mount outside the game and you could rig them to the game to payout any way you like.

And no one cares.

Maybe the industry worked for too many years to clean up pinball's gambling image that they did too good a job ?

LTG : )

Are payouts in your area illegal ? ( of course than why would anyone play it ? )

LTG : )

So, basically, ticket redemption modern bagatelle or bingo tables are what would be successful by today's arcade standards? It's funny that with pinball's history of being shunned by some parents and politicians as gambling devices arcades have, for the most part, become little more than proverbial kiddie-casinos.

Gambleing is legal in some counties but i'm not sure about the one i was in. At any rate, they could have had it dispence tickets instead of just taking your money. There was a sign on the machine that said "win only what falls into the lower tray". I was mislead by this, nothing COULD ever fall into the lower tray.

Yea i'm not down with the kiddie-casinos either..

Money can have that effect.

LTG : )

video gambling devices have been legal in illinois since october of 2012 (which you know WMS and ITgames is very happy about)

A lot of redemption games are pure luck, but as mentioned skeeball has skill, and so do basketball hoop games, even coin pushers do (there is timing to it). I remember when I was a young teen, I would sometimes play redemption in the hopes of actually getting a gift cheap, sometimes it was just to finish off my tokens (save ticket receipts up). Heck, I even remember a video horse racing redemption at galaxy world in carol stream. At some point, the videos repeated so if you had the time and patience, you could know every outcome of every race.

I like the option of "advanced player mode" and "redemption mode". If I'm a player, and just want to play, I have that option (and pay less). If I want redemption ticket mode, I can pick that. Problem with redemption, there's a lot of adult players that don't want to pay $1.50-$2.25 per game to win a bunch of tickets.

Well, I'm glad the tickets are helping the Tron. Might not be perfect, but at least Tron is getting some more plays.

Funny story... My gf and I live in a town with only one pin nearby, it's at a Chuck-E
-Cheese. We've been going there and playing it just to play for a few months, and it always said "TICKET! At so & so amount of points!".

We'd hit the goal score, it would say we won a ticket and a light would flash, blah blah. We never got a ticket, figured it was no big deal, one ticket, who cares?

Well, last time we went, we hit the ticket score, and all of a sudden, this huge 4 or 5 inch ticket (usually tickets there are about an inch big) prints out that's worth 150 tickets!

So, to be honest, I'm a 26 year old and freaked out about how cool it was to win this huge ticket that was worth basically a million dollars in crappy little plastic toy gold. So, even though the score would be impossible for some random little kid who's never played pinball to hit, I feel like Chuck-E-Cheese does have the right idea for at least pulling in the parents that are there with their kids and might either 1) wanna relive an old past time of theirs or 2) win their kid a bunch of tickets.

I was just acknowledging the hypocrisy involved.