Of course you're right, but in a strange way the clunkiness e.g. of the sword ramp adds to the "rough middle earth battle" theme & feel of the pin. Buttery flow would be kind of misplaced here. And you gotta love the smooth lightning fast return from the left ramp, fits Legolas' elegant signature moves from the movies perfectly. Gimli is also a pretty cool, you don't see pins that force you to shoot "soft" at something very often.

SM is a really cool great shooting game, but sometimes the music is slightly to chaotic for me and the callouts are not really good. Goblin's laughter is great, though.

LotR wins this one for me, just because it's such an epic game overall.

Couldn't agree more with Atomicboy, but I do feel some shots are "clunky" to a degree. As stated before these shots add to the theme's rough battle feel.

I think it's funny the Gimli shot is criticized as "rejecting" when the ball flies over. It is meant to be that way, it's a soft shot on purpose and really rewarding if you are able to shoot it consistently. And it fit's the Dwarfs skillset of throwing and catching things with extreme accuracy very well.
The sword ramp feels like a battle sword strike with the clunky target hit on the ramp.
Legolas feels, well, like Legolas, swift and smooth.
PotD is a bit rough and uncontrolled - but again this perfectly fits the movie scenes in the cave when everything breaks down in chaos.
If you want to push it, you could even argue that the Gandalf shot is a bit "wobbly" because Gandalf is an old man.

It seems to me that often players don't even notice how much though went into this game, how every shot fits its character and how the roughness of the theme perfectly translates into gameplay.

Finally, I've owned LotR for approx. 8 months now and have almost made it to Valinor a few times, but I NEVER have had a tower saucer reject, NEVER had any multiple attempts for the Gimli VUK and only had 2 or 3 dropbacks to the tower from the PotD. The Ring shot works very well to, it does drop the ball at mode start maybe 1 out of 10 times, but in DTR it always worked flawlessly in 2-ball-mode up to now.

There is a certain clunkiness to the game, but that is intended and adds to the feel. Everything else mentioned is a problem of the game not being dialed in correctly.

Does this mean there is a fix for the situation when die ball comes through the left orbit in "war of the ents" mode and is not stopped by the diverter (stop post) behind the tower?

It's the only shot that doesn't work 100% on my LotR and I have no clue how to make it work better. It's works perfectly for the left loop, it just sometimes lets the ball go full loop when coming from the right loop.

Great, thanks a lot!

I was starting to give up on this one as I assumed a software problem (timing being off on slower balls) was causing this. I think I checked the rollover and gate switches a thousand times to find the problem. Somehow it never occurred to me that it could be a mechanical problem.

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Maybe it's really just a different use of the term "clunky". Sword ramp is a good example - the ball doesn't smoothly and continuously flow through that ramp like e.g. on Monster Bash (which is a similar ramp concept-wise), it travels up, hits a target causing a full stop (= a "clunk") and then just dribbles down the ramp without power. It's not a buttery smooth shot, it's kind of "edgy" (if you prefer this word over "clunky").

On PotD it also doesn't leave the mini-PF smoothly, it drops uncontrolled onto the Arwen plastic (clunk 1) and does another uncontrolled drop (clunk 2) into the VUK as opposed to being smoothly guided from the mini-PF to the VUK.

But as previously mentioned this roughness (= clunkiness) adds to the rough feel of the theme, so it's a very positive and intended clunkiness to me.

I might be wrong, havn't paid attention for a while, but I think it alternates with the callouts "the path of the dead" and "the dead are coming", it's not always "get ahold of yourself".

I guess we already noticed that the sound quality varies heavily from game to game. On mine with the complete PinballPro setup including the high power sub upgrade the VUK sound is a deep undistorted thump that even makes the machine shake slightly. The Spinner sound is a very clear "swords clashing" sound. I do remember that the factory speakers were a serious mess and couldn't handle the dynamics of the modified (only the sound was upgraded from standard whitestar boards) LotR-CPU/Soundboard at all, especially for very deep (VUK) and very high (Spinner) sounds.

This thread kind of supported my impression that the sound quality varies heavily between different machines. LotR uses a custom whitestar CPU with a heavily upgraded 16Bit sound segment (standard Whitestar is 8 bit sound). Maybe they used different components for different runs of the custom LotR boards or some components do not age well or some have the standard whitestar sound components, but I'm really just guessing.

So I'm not comfortable to say if you upgrade the speakers the sound will be great. On my machine the sound was ok before the upgrade, it wasn't really great though and especially the more dynamic sound bits were slightly "scratchy". This more or less completely vanished after the speaker upgrade on mine.
I've had visitors (who own LotR themselves) who asked me if I'm using something like the pinball browser or pinsound board to get such clear sound, but it's just the standard setup with PinballPro speakers. I guess they make the best out of what the board can deliver while the Stern stock speakers which can hardly handle 8-bit-sound are completely overcharged by the 16-bit range used in LotR.

I've given up on posting what you are posting above.

There obviously seem to be many pinheads that rate the attribute "NIB" higher than the model/theme/game they are getting. Look how often posts in this thread have the message "i'll rather buy an inferior (given the general consent that LotR is one of Sterns best 3 pins of all time) pin than a used one".

It still strikes me how differently pinheads think.

For me a new and readily available in best case "ok" game with mediocre build quality and unfinished code is worth much less than a game which is out of production (= "rare" to a certain extent), packed with features, one of the best of it's kind and has a build quality Stern will most likely never reach again.

A 5K plus LotR is MUCH better value than a 6 or 7K WWE, TWD or Mustang...

To me NIB is the most overrated and overpriced approach to pinball.

It's interesting to see people thinking exactly the other way around.