I never take any whining seriously from people who only pay entrance fees. The vendors and game bringers make the show . The promoters provide the venue and are instrumental in even having a show. SSDS , I paid my 25$ ... or my 100$... well whoop de freakin’ doo. Try lugging trailers and spent countless hours loading and unloading. THEN maybe someone of relevance will listen to those concerns.

Nice! Congrats on the new game.

Game was beautiful, and it was nice to chat with you via Zach. Awesome job on the restoration.

As someone who is in ultimately customer service, I disagree.

Customers make the show, without them you have no show.

There has to be a fair balance between all three.

Good to finally meet you too Dave. Good to know you’re not really Brian from Family Guy.

I see your point but I still
Say product over consumer . Peace out.

It was several hours before the official tags were able to be printed. Folks who were selling games didn't want to miss out on prime selling time.

Then how do you explain the reboot of PONG?

Yes, we had some bigger technical challenges going on in the background that the team was focused on solving so we just didn’t have a chance to get the registration desk fully operational as soon as we wanted to when it comes to printing. OTOH, the check-in software is super robust and the longest part of the process was literally explaining how our 2019 stickers got lost in shipment. BTW, those stupid stickers never arrived!

I'll make a note of that for the software wish-list. Even with the existing software, you could pull up the games list while at the show, sort by the For Sale column, and see all the ones listed as being for sale at that current moment. Icons show you where the games are located (n icon means main Free Play room). We have more capabilities behind the scenes than are currently exposed to the world. Watch us improve!
.................David Marston

Gabe already noted that we had a couple sick-outs. Our outdoor Flea Market was more robust than past years, though. I contacted some startup companies with pinball-related products who said they weren't ready for 2019, but plan to exhibit at our 2020 show.
.................David Marston

What came first pong or pong buyers .

I think I was the only one who made his own sign describing the game, and offering it for sale. It worked like a charm. Game was sold early on Friday. Don't rely on others to do what you can do yourself.
Screenshot_2019-07-01-20-57-31 (resized).png

The font on the for sale tickets at this show is so small - it’s a pain.

Your Mini Pool was sold on Friday because it was probably the best playing EM there, and rare as hell too. Sign, schmign...it's the game that sells the game.
The bye bye 1000 pop bumper once you complete the balls then drain is an excellent touch you only get with the AAB version.

Thanks. I appreciate your comments. Just about everyone who played it when I was nearby said what a great player it was. Kind of sorry to see it go, but I hope the new owner has as much fun with it as I had. I agree with what you've said, but the sign I made made it clear that the game was offered for sale.

I know mine was a change to for sale because i wanted something at the show.

i bought one of the Octoberfests from Coin Taker. they were fantastic to work with and the game is really really good. its too bad there's a podcaster thats been crapping all over the game without ever playing it. Hopefully word of mouth will get out on just how great this game is.

i loved that mini-pool. nice job

One of the highlights of my weekend was putting all 10 balls into holes on that little machine in the back, a Mills perhaps, including the 2000 point hole, for a score of 7700. Not a single ball made it to the Out trench. That was fun

Nope you definitely were not. There were actually quite a few. I came prepared, luckily. When I checked in my 8 games the show was not able to print anything. Not sure why the show wasn't prepared but at least I was. The whole electronic registration system was a huge failure imo.

I regret that I was unable to come this year. Anyone know what weekend 2020 will be?

As I mentioned above, we had some bigger technical issues that got in the way of us finalizing the table set up. Part of the challenges we’ve had with the Sturbridge location is that the hotel WiFi is essentially useless, so we have a day and a half ahead of opening to get our gear loaded in, get all the signage up, and get all the stations operational, and then add in setting up and running our own network. As we were doing all this, we had some big challenges with things at the hotel that weren’t working as they had in the past, which got in the way of us being able to address some of the smaller issues like having to replace the check in station printer bc the first one failed. This wasn’t a case of “plug & print” like it would be at home bc we had to get the new printer integrated into the network.

I’m not excusing the gap—I’ve already started working on what we can do to be better prepared for next year’s show—but giving you some context for a frustration you experienced.

June 25, 2020 – June 28, 2020

Boxboro Regency
242 Adams Pl
Boxborough, MA 01719

https://www.pinballnews.com/site/event/pintastic/

Inovation is not easy. The system will evolve as we move forward. Here is a list of what our system does that no other show.

Being able to register your games than log in and change them as you get closer to show time

Being able to scan the WR code on the game to report repair ticket, get contact info on the owner, vote for best in show, pricing if it's for sale and get info about the game.

Keep an up to date list of registered games by the day.

The system is proprietary and developed by our in house programmer Andy. You will only see it improve in the future.

I had for sale cards ready anticipating the same thing as last year, I do that for every show now, that way you can list your improvements ect. When there cards came out, I was happy to see the color change for the pins for sale, although I never got cards for 3 if my pins

This whole QR code, printing out stuff may be getting a little too cute.

Just make cards like Allentown and have a ton of sharpies laying around. I too was pretty confused as to what was for sale and for how much most of the time and I pretty much just stopped looking.

I played (and LOVED!) Oktoberfest! After ACNC, it's my next pin.
As far as that podcaster is concerned, don't worry- he'll change his mind the next day and have a love-fest over it. Then he'll change his mind again. It's all part of his "condition".

Are you color blind lol. Game for sale were green. We have no desire to go backwards. Allantown has there system that works for them. We will continue to improve our system and it will be the best in the industry when finished.

I am.

When the cards were in place, the info was usable. But there is a large amount of room for improvement from a design standpoint. Pricing info was too small being the one thing that stands out, but if I got another look at the cards I'm sure there were other things.

I basically had to squint and lean over players in order to sort of see what was on the tag. The text should probably be at least double the size to be visible--and should be easily visible if you're behind a player at the game or just walking by. Considering how big the tag is, there really shouldn't be an issue with font size.

Also, I'm not sure that the card color mattered too much when the lights were turned down. There wasn't enough contrast between the white and bright green to tell the difference between them with lowered lighting.

Looking at the comments about the game-bringer system (up through #729) collectively, I can see that different people are at different stages of acceptance or endorsement of our approach. We had game cards right from the first show in 2015, a time when a few other pinball shows were doing that. By now, the idea of came cards is much more widespread. A few other shows have repair teams and ask game-bringers to give keys to show staff; I don't know if any other show has repair-ticket software. This year, many more of the people who bring games to Pintastic were comfortable about entering game data in our system and then logging back in later to make changes. If we seem to be moving too fast, we have the option of including older methods in addition to the newer ones, such as putting out paper repair-ticket forms while retaining the software-based repair ticket system. (The Repair Station and the software support paper tickets; we just need to print some and tell Tech Team members to look for them in the In tray.)

Our plan is to print the first batch of game cards just before the show starts, then print individual cards as needed when changes occur at the show. We also want to get better at reminding game-bringers about their pre-show options through timely emails. These are examples of things that we already planned to do, but ran into resource issues when trying to do them. And the Game Registration desk needed at least 16 volunteer-hours more than it got. But we also had notable successes in speed of check-in and thoroughness of ownership checks on games being removed.

Of all the games we tracked in our system, about 1/8 were sold and triggered the printing of a replacement game card. (That figure does not include sales by vendors in the Vendor Hall or Flea Market, just private sales of "carded" games.) I think that demonstrates how our approach is facilitating sales while also keeping more games in Free Play for more hours.
.................David Marston

Good point, and this is something we can test in advance. We just need to stick to colors that don't interfere with scanning the QR code.
.................David Marston

Are recordings off the seminars available anywhere?

For what it is worth, I am very color blind and until I read this thread I had no idea there were green signs anywhere.

His BK 2000 was really something special. Stunning and played fantastic.

Monitor our YouTube channel
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1hsYk9HhlG9AxvS2IgaUkA
and seminar recordings will be posted one-by-one as the finished/produced forms become available. We don't guarantee to post every seminar, but last year, we did most of them.
.................David Marston

Does anyone actually use QR codes? My phone doesn't support them without installing an app, I was just typing in URLs manually every time a game was down (which was almost half the ones I tried to play...)

We will be increasing the text size quite a bit moving forward.

I reported 5 or 6 issues via the QR system. I love it! Anything that cuts down the amount of walking is a fine thing by me.

The iPhone camera has a QR reader built in. Open camera, aim, click the web link that pops up. Extremely easy to report game issues. My girlfriend even commented on how slick it was.

Agreed. Even Steve Ritchie was impressed by how nice it was!

I can't put the blame on the show operators for the non operating games. Folks have to bring a machine in 100% working order. I found several that had mis-adjusted flippers, others that were not leveled properly, some that wouldn't start.

We did not account for color blind people I'm sorry. We will need to place a line FOR SALE on the card to account for this. We are learning and appreciate any feedback to improve our system.

Add-A-Ball adjustment secrets revealed!

Many of you were pleased to see Lariat, the rare 2-player add-a-ball game, placed next to its replay counterpart, Wild Wild West. This was a joint project of @wheyface and me. Below is an excerpt of @ForceFlow's photo.

Most add-a-ball games of that era just took in dimes and had no meters to count anything. I wanted to be able to measure how generous the game is and how often it was played in two-player mode. I had lots of the standard counters, so I made up an add-in panel with four of them. For three of the four, I also added switches to switch stacks, so that the respective meter would get a pulse at the proper time.

Here are the results for Pintastic New England 2019:
Total plays: 503 (2-player game counts as 2, per standard practice)
2-player games: 45
Total Extra Balls: 200
Extra Balls won on score: 18
The purpose of that last measurement is to adjust the generosity. There are three ways to win extra balls (score, 1-5 sequence, vari-target collected when all the way back), but only the scores are adjustable. I had the scores at 50K and 70K. Total extra balls should have been closer to one for every game played, so I have now changed it to 30K and 70K, which is one of the few pre-printed score cards I have. The adjustment plugs only support even multiples of 10,000 from 30K to 70K. I don't know when this game will go out in public again, but when it does, I'll "take readings" again and see if it awards enough EBs.

I am quite sure that no other electro-mechanical add-a-ball out there has enough counters to be able to adjust the scores based on hard data.
.................David Marston

LariatWWW2019crop (resized).jpg

Lariat Meters - Front (resized).png

Go ahead and install an app. For android, I've had QR Droid installed for years. Just be sure to disable the advanced settings for anonymous data reporting and location reporting.

I scanned the QR codes several times to report game issues.

Actually, the cards did have that wording. The font is tall vertically but condensed horizontally. In our haste, we also didn't print the back-side material on the cards, which some of you may remember from last year. We've been using 5x8 cards for the past few years, which gives us room to fix the layout.

We could put "For Sale" and "Not For Sale" in different fonts than the rest of the card (and different than each other). Or maybe we should supplement the wording with an icon. Of course, when you bring up the game info on your web browser, it should all be there where you can read it comfortably.
.................David Marston

There is simply nothing anybody can do about this. Soliciting games from the general public you will always run into issues like this.

The best you can do is bring your own games and lead by example.

The on-line system was outstanding this year. I like your idea about an icon, maybe a sale tag or something, that is easily viewed from the walkway. Or a yield-sign neon yellow background that stands out. The on-line system is great if you know what you want but there will always be window shoppers that might be interested in something when they see it.

Maybe your pager could have read them?
Time to upgrade from that Nokia flip phone.

Keep in mind that you can't always get close enough to the game in order to scan the QR code when other people are playing it.

I'm definitely a window shopper, lol

I usually walk around to see what's there, what looks interesting, and what prices are. I don't usually look for a specific title. In fact, I bought one there that wasn't even really on my short list.