I used to love cruising around playing on the pins around my city. As soon as I got my own I realised how sub par those routed pins were and it makes it harder to enjoy them. But it also made me realise how much work it takes to get them playing perfectly.

In terms of pinball's success in arcades, kids do genuinely love to play pinball when they play on mine. They're besotted with it. But in the arcades their coins go straight to the shooting and driving games instead because they're not good enough at pinball to get their money's worth. Evidenced by a local arcade that has free play nights — kids love the pins on those nights because they're not afraid of wasting their money.

I think it's the high barrier to entry that explains why pinball machines can't attract new players. This combined with the fact that most people don't realise that there is far more to pinball than just keeping a ball bouncing around a playfield. The rules are impossible for newbies to understand and instruction cards only help players already well versed in pinball.

One of the things that video game designers have had to do to in recent years is invent ways to teach a player the game and ease them into it without needing to read a manual or work through tutorials. Pinball needs to solve the same problem in it's own way.

That sounds excellent. Awesome idea!

While video games have become good at teaching people how to play, even arcade video games don't have that luxury. But they get by on guaranteed game time and familiar gimmicks. There isn't really any complexity to grasp. The value for money proposition is obvious and convincing.

I noticed a Congo nearby my work has a novice or normal mode to play on. Novice is unlimited balls for three minutes and if you drain after that it's game over. That is a good idea but it fails completely in it's implementation: without approaching the machine, inserting your coins and selecting it, you don't know the mode is there or what it does. That already puts the mode out of the reach of anyone who might benefit from it.

The thing that frustrates me the most about operated pins is when the flippers aren't up to scratch. Half of the pins in my city have a weak or misaligned flipper and so I simply don't go back to play them. Flippers are easy to get to and easy to fix. There is zero chance I'll put more money into a pin that has a flipper issue because there's nothing worse than losing a ball (money) because of a crappy flipper.

A hot dog vendor would never run out of ketchup. A pinball op should never have weak flippers.

It's unfair to assume every issue is due to laziness. There are a myriad of reasons why an issue with a pin might be unresolved.

You're right about the cyclical nature of this phenomenon. I'd describe as more of a chicken and egg scenario. But it is one in which the operator is the only party that can change the situation.

A broken pin is less likely to make money. Operator can fix it but it takes time/money. The decision of a player whether or not to insert a coin into a pin is something that only the operator can change.