These are beyond issues that happen during shipping.

Awesome 24 downvotes!! Thank you. You will like my next post with a code issue.

No issues unless you enter it wrong: u, u, d, d, l, r, l, r, b, a, START.

You must be fun a parties. You have some new doom and gloom friends here in the thread though so congratulations.

Needs an update for ball search in the code to add the ball save drop target. So don’t people down vote me for posting since I am a beta tester apparently by some of you and should expect it.

Hit Mystery Machine multiball last night and love that the original theme song is there. I went dark and didn’t watch anything about Scooby. That was an awesome surprise. Love the game now that is seems issues are ironed out for the most part so I can enjoy it.

YOU HAVE AN EARLY GAME OFF THE LINE. That’s your problem.

This has been addressed already. Fixed for next update.

I support the idea of giving you a refund to return the game

Your so so funny?!!! When have I ever said I hated the game?? And you would honestly be ok with all the problems I had? Your a joke.

C334AC79-13A2-41AC-8E41-8F99BB965566 (resized).jpeg

I think the core staff at Spooky is great. They love pinball and are doing a great job of delivering a unique product. That being said, I think the workforce pool in that small town is hurting them. It takes a certain type of person to work on a pin. Some of that can be taught, but the desire needs to be there. I am afraid that some of the people assembling the games for them now aren't people who would be working in the industry if other jobs were available. I see the same problem in my industry, and I live in Los Angeles. It has to be way worse for Spooky. Their hiring pool is tiny. That town is super small and remote. To be honest, they are probably hiring anyone who wants a job. I think this is where the quality problem is coming from. The crimps on my Halloween were awful. I had to redo a bunch of them. The solder job seen on a couple of these Scooby-Doo(s) was terrible. Lots of stuff is leaving the factory without being connected. Additional training is only go to approve things so much. Hopefully, they can sort things out.

That’s a really good point about the small town workforce. I’m sure that is a challenge

You know the more I think about it whoever nicknamed you Douche Canoe was spot on.

No doubt some issues like bad connections/crimps/solder jobs are not a shipping thing at all. But... Alignment issues, loose connectors, things like that absolutely could be. Not trying to argue with you as I don't disagree but I also don't completely agree either if that makes any sense at all.

But the real question is if this happened would we then have a sticker on every lock bar of every spooky game that says add more foam here?

Need to re-post this shirtless. d0n has set precedent that cannot be ignored.

I really encourage you to just take a deep breath and calm down. Early run games, from all manufacturers, tend to have the most issues off the line. Tend to is the key as there's plenty of examples of no early run issues so not trying to paint with an overly broad brush. I wouldn't go so far as to say you're a beta tester but I do think you need to understand the risks that come with early run games. I'm 100000000% sure Spooky would love for each game to be absolutely perfect and no one have any issues at all but that's not reality. Granted I do see some things Spooky consistently has issues with that they really need to correct as they tend to be reoccurring in their early runs of all games and it's not fair to expect the consumer to know this and adjust accordingly. This is an imperfect world and screws fall out all of the time, the question is how you chose to handle that...

Not really a comment on your post, but did you know that Stern had to open an employment office to hire new workers on a daily basis because of turnover?

How about don’t over-tighten the wire form? Will they include a proper Alan wrench for flippers?

I’m sure the Spooky crew in private will loathe the money they took from him and I’m sure he begged to be NUMBER 32. I can’t remember my number but I know he’s NUMBER 32.

Really? That’s crazy.

As others have pointed out, when pinball was a proper industry, manufacturers shipped the first dozens/hundreds of "sample" games off the line to special test locations to suss out all the glitches. Stern sorta still does this with the operator Pro run. The early games will always have issues, especially from a boo-tique manufacturer like Spooky.

So Ballykiss, would you rather have your game right now, warts and all, or would you rather be still waiting until this initial "sample" run was done and you get a later, fixed game a couple months from now?

If answer is the former (which I suspect it is, based on daughter comments), then stop bitching, you got exactly what you wanted. If the latter, don't order an early game next time. Really simple.

I get it and understand. I’m not trying to throw rocks from my glass house. My businesses get things wrong all of the time. We are constantly trying to be better. I’m done drinking the kool-aid with all of these companies. These are things that just shouldn’t be happening. Not for this amount of money. Someone said that I was in the wrong hobby and when I read that I almost spit out my coffee. Yup pinballs require work, but a NIB game should absolutely not - period. Why should anyone have to spend time correcting issues that should have been caught at the factory? Sure if I buy your players condition taxi - I would expect to work on it, but not NIB. This isn’t Spooky specific either. All of these manufacturers should be building a better product. My last two NIB from Stern had zero issues. That was a pleasant surprise. Hopefully when my Scooby comes up #238 I believe - it is perfect. I shouldn’t have to waste my time calling, emailing, waiting, etc., etc. on correcting a new game. That’s great if customer service is excellent, but why should “we” have to do all of the work on something new that cost over $10,000?

Your in the wrong hobby

I would expect this has been said more or less consistently since the 1930s, maybe even earlier... and yet here we are, still buying these big semi-working boxes of sound and lights...

Perhaps this is a stupid question but why did that stop, the early testing stuff that is? Seems like something you'd want to have, a core group of operators test the games in the wild first then go full production. I'm probably missing something obvious when it comes to Spooky.

No surprise at all. Lots of bad work environment reviews posted by the rank and file on multiple employment sites, like:

"Horrible work environment, no sense of direction from management. Needs some form of leadership in that building.
They really have varied opinions of working and on boarding new employees"

and

"The management is very unprofessional and make decisions based on their mood that. I worked primarily in the woodshop area and the throughout the factory in almost every part of the assembly area and was not hired on full time. I have a friend that has been working there for a year now and he is still not hired on full time."

...and their pay is very low for an expensive place like Chicago suburbs. Glassdoor says $1800/mo for a pinball tech as of 2022. That's poverty level in Chicagoland.

That agrees with the $11.50/hr they posted on indeed.com:
https://www.indeed.com/cmp/Stern-Pinball/locations/IL/Elk%20Grove%20Village

Our In-n-Out STARTS at $16/hr here, and I guarantee our cost of living is less here in podunk Redding, CA.

The satisfaction and pay seems to improve when you get into the higher-skill positions, but still below acceptable levels for similar work, IMO.

No it’s just jerk on her who think I should not post any issues and email spooky only. I posted on her to get some help and also point out problems so Spooky can see the issues. Yes I was stressed and my daughter just had brain surgery last Wednesday and I wanted her to be able to play it before she went in.

Then I had some more issues to deal with that made it unplayable like a ground wire that was only hanging on by one strand of wire apparently and I had no idea where it went to because the action button, launch button, and right flippers would not work.

The green habitrail ended up tweaked when put in the ball would get stuck.

One of the coin reject buttons LED light socket ground wire was not soldered on.

The start button did not have an LED in it.

The launch button LED was dead.

The rear left microswitch was missing the threaded end bracket to screw it to the bracket, so it was hanging down.

The right upper flipper was down too low causing the ball to get stuck on the upper playfield. Was not fun tightening that down but figured it out myself on what needs to be done.

My point is this stuff should have been caught at the factory and I was told they were trying to get the game out. Even though mine was born on 12-22-2022.

I love the game and I support spooky, but this was things that should have been caught. Down vote me anyone if you want. Just don’t be a fanboy or try to make me look like I hate spooky. I paid over $10k for the game, but if Stern had issues like this you wouldn’t tell me just to email Stern.

Owners threads are to report problems and possibly solutions to them. And also any code issues, which I did and still got down voted by a troll.

Enjoy your game everyone.

Why not have your customers do all that work for free and get a much larger sample set for tweaks and fixes? Especially now that software field updates are dead simple, which wasn't the case in olden times when they had to burn a new rom for new code changes.

"Ship it and we'll fix it later" is the mantra in many industries. Video games are the same way now.

With WMS it died with their pinball division. Stern used to send machines to secret test locations back in the early 2000s but the Chicago Pinball Mafia was good a tracking them down and messing up their numbers by playing much better than the general public... Not sure if Stern still does test locations or not these days, but I don't see any signs of it.

I imagine it stopped when arcades were barely a thing and Stern was the only manufacturer. They probably think it works well enough without it now since they can't make games fast enough. I mean I do not disagree that there needs to be some sort of accountability and quality assurance on these things as prices have went up, quality has remained 'okay' at best, and code is hit or miss depending on the game. I took a risk on R&M, but even then I knew to wait until at least mid run. I'm not sure why people think they need to be at the front of the line, but it's pretty standard that they are not the best....which is odd because you would think QA would be the tightest on the first games coming off the line. As usual though, no one is really giving any of these manufacturers a reason to improve. Sending games back under lemon laws would certainly get some attention.

If this is true the hobby will be dead soon. There are only so many people who have the level of experience necessary to deal with major issues. A theme like Scooby has mass appeal and is meant to bring in new owners who don’t have any experience. This isn’t specific to Spooky, but if we want the hobby to grow we should expect all manufacturers deliver a working product out of the box.

cant hide a test game today like they could back then. it would be all over the net in a millisecond

Oh don’t get me wrong I’d love for it all to work great out of the box. It’s just never been my experience

Yeah, its probably all just shipping damage from jostling around.

Those 12 holes drilled in your playfield, that cracked mystery van, Those wires that weren't soldered on properly... shipping damage.

Just relax if your $11k new pinball doesnt work. RELAX! It's not a big deal! Just like if you bought a new car and you couldn't drive it. It's OK. Just relax!

The apologists on this thread are amazing. Are y'all getting team games or what?

Challenging in the number of workers - not really in terms of kind of people.

Training, Process and qa is used to make these kinds of workers successful. The less process and qa you have, the more you rely on workers being perfect. You design your workflows and checkpoints to ensure errors are caught before they propagate and to give training feedback to the workers to reduce error rates.

This is expensive to do thoroughly so it is often minimized or glossed over. reworking these systems for every new game takes time to design and refine. This is what makes pinball hard… manufacturing reliably and at scale is nothing like putting your personal stuff back together.

It takes time and cycles to learn how to design these processes. But the end result is you can function with staff with little to no experience - you train them on the job tasks and use the qa processes to reduce your exposure to their limited experience.

This is how most assembly plants get by with just contract labor.

I totally get where this guy is coming from. He got a fucking lemon from spooky and all you spooky apologists are shitting on him because he's posting about it. Thats wrong guys.

If this were my game, I'd have driven it to benton (no matter how far away it was) and thrown it through their showroom window at 1am.

Couldn’t agree more!

I’ve been asked to beta test many times, but have never been told to post all my findings online. It’s always report to the person writing the code. If you’re going to claim to be a beta tester and post issues you find, at least read through the thread so you don’t post about an issue thats already been addressed by Spooky.

So far it Looks like no improvement on quality over previous releases. I would definitely be out if I could get my deposit refunded.

Spooky's issue with quality definitely stems from overall employee skills and (lack of) level of care (Mad_Dog_Coin_Op nailed it). It seems that no one here followed the TNA CE release. Machines well into the hundreds continued having substantial issues, and this was on a machine they have built hundreds of previously.

What I suspect from observing that release unfold is that Spooky will knowingly let machines that fail QA still go out the door in hopes that: 1. the issues are just lived with, 2. the person receiving it will just fix it and move on, 3. they know they can fix them later if solicited. There must have been some cost analysis done to determine this is the unfortunate path they have to take.

I'm still a big Spooky fan and have just basically accepted this as one of the brands caveats, which is sad, but it's also not unheard of in a niche hobby.

I feel bad for the guy and his family that had issues with his new Scooby Doo pin.
Lots of people jumped on him to protect the pin they purchased and that is wrong.
He posted pictures and videos of his family playing a brand new game that had issues.
Shame on the few that gave him shit in this thread.

Edit - nevermind - feeding the trolls just encourages them to stick around.

If spooky is still recruiting their assembly help from the local high school, someone needs to have a sit down with the shop instructor.

HBO

I feel bad for him too. There is not harm in sharing his story. If anything it is helpful.

I'm trying to figure out the quality issues with Spooky my Halloween was flawless. My buddies Halloweens were flawless align with their R&M.

What are there 100 games out in the wild and what a few that are constantly reporting on here instead of dealing with Spooky directly? I'm sure my numbers are way off.

I think it's more hey look I knew they had issues see I told ya they had issues omg I was right they had issues nothing is better. Meanwhile Stern frying node boards, can't figure out how to not zip tie to tight, they have playfield issues, hahaha and you can't get a hold of their customer service to save your life.

JJP haha well I won't even go there. Yeah I understand I should consider myself lucky but even if I had issues I'm not going to come on here and make countless annoying posts over and over.

Now I'm sure Kaneda will flame me for even posting this because now I'm sticking up for a company that they all thinks QC is garbage. Even when he does I'll still pay him $5 a month lol It's simple buy the game or not if you have issues reach out to Spooky.

Sorry for the annoying posts but good hell lol spend your money how you want but nobody here actually cares how you spend it. Not many here care for the constant griping, bickering, complaining, bashing, and or what you think is help.

It's just pinball people.

Ps spooky send me a game I'll sign a NDA and test it fix it play it enjoy it. Can't wait to get mine.

exactly, like the shooter lane switch that spooky employees tried numerous times to get right by drilling more and more holes and putting the switch in different places... but still couldn't get it right and eventually said FUCK IT, SEND IT OUT! The guy that got this game had the same issues that spooky couldn't fix and now he's left holding the bag. That's bullshit spooky. Buy this game back from him.

Customers Fault?

THIS ^

And here is f*cking d0n again shitting in every thread he cares to visit, trying to drum up hysteria, and being protected by mods.

That is a manufacturers problem. There are many ways to do something wrong.
There is only one way to do something right.