nah. The Pinball Arcade plays *much* easier than the real-life machines in almost every case. and even if the virtual table was near-perfect in difficulty, very few (bordering on zero) pinball players would consider a score on a virtual machine as meaning anything anyway.

take Funhouse, for example. on The Pinball Arcade, I can play that game literally indefinitely. i can get the extra ball from the mirror on every single ball. the last time i played it, the game lasted over 2 hours and I had about 300 million points before I got bored and drained. Meanwhile, the Funhouse in my basement, I struggle to break ten million! real-life games are just fundamentally more difficult because the shots and ricochets are far less repeatable and predictable. if you play TPA long enough on any table, you begin to notice the ball behaves EXACTLY the same way on certain shots and bounces every time. in real life, it doesn't work like that.

The Pinball Arcade is great for learning what a lots of different pins are like, learning their layouts and rules and strategies, but mastering a pin on your iPad will not translate to mastering that pin in real life.

on the subject of the high scores posted on Pinside: they are mostly just for fun anyway. it's basically an honor system. there's nothing stopping people from taking off the glass of games they own and bashing switches by hand, other than the fact that it'd be a super pathetic thing to do.

And even if you do decide you trust the scores posted, there is still the fact that scores on different locations of the same game are completely non-comparable anyway. there are far too many variables: whether extra balls are on or off and myriad other custom game settings, the slope, the playfield condition, the outlane posts on many games are adjustable, condition of the flipper mechs, condition and type of rubbers, strength of the pop bumpers and slings ... even microscopic differences in geometry can make one pin play vastly different than another. also, saucers and mystery hole kickouts behave very differently from game to game and can make a huge difference in difficulty.