Skimmed through most of this, but gotta say.. I have the supposedly-soft 12-ply Mirco playfield in my Met LE, and it's pretty much the best playfield I've seen in a modern Stern. Dimpling is very minor despite crazy airballs (never installed sparky protectors), no woodgrain showing, no chipping or ghosting, very smooth clear and inserts. The game's gotten thousands of plays.. to the point I've already had to change Sparky's magnet but the PF is holding up great with zero wear. Maybe they got mutant birch trees or something, but this playfield is definitely much better than average for Stern.

Need to check my WOZ, not sure who made its playfield. Its dimpling is also very minor and with zero woodgrain showing, but the clear is a bit more brittle.

Compared to these, the BM66 I saw at a show once with craters for dimples.. there was definitely something wrong with that Batman playfield.

With the MetLE and WOZ playfields, the fact they're 12ply is likely the difference... 12ply of birch is harder than 7 of maple, or at least that would seem to be the case.

As for those particularly egregious examples (BM66 and GB) that had much deeper than normal dimples - Stern probably just got a bad batch of wood. I haven't seen any games in a year or so that looked really abnormal... just batmans and GBs. Everything else since then has the normal light dimpling that any game gets. Hopefully the problem is behind us.

Naw, there's something wrong with the Batman game. You could go over every square inch of my MetLE playfield and you wouldn't find damage even half as bad as this Batman playfield. And my Met has had plenty of airballs and plenty of plays (although not the tens of thousands required to completely dimple the entire surface). It's the supposedly softer Birch as well.

Is it really that hard to envision that some playfields were simply made with substandard plywood? Young trees, diseased trees, wrong trees, whatever.. my eyes don't lie.

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You don't. You buy "Lumber Core Hard Maple plywood" like usual and you just happen to get a batch that isn't as hard as prior batches. Trees of the same species can grow differently and have slightly different wood densities. I'm not saying Stern did this on purpose, I'm saying sh*t happens.

Can't believe this is 13 pages long now and some of you can't grasp the fact that there was, for whatever reason, just a crummy batch of playfields around BM66 production time. It's not like everyone suddenly and simultaneously decided this was a problem - basic visual observation of damage showed those playfields were different, hence the discussion. That BSD dimple looks about half the size of the craters I've seen on BM66.

Just like the GB ghosting issue.. amazing how that's no longer a problem now that Stern (supplier) fixed whatever the hell was wrong with that process.

I'm just glad the F'd up playfields are for shitty games and not the good one (Maiden!)