Sometimes ago I started a thread regarding the credibility of the TOP 100 Pinside ranking:

https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/the-real-ranking

Together with many other pinsiders we agreed that for many reasons the ranking cannot be trusted too much (especially because of scores manipulations by owners).

Anyway I was considering another aspect not discussed yet, that I think it's very important: looking at the ranking we usually look in the first place at the # POSITION of a game. #12 is clearly much better than #67, right?

But if you look at the SCORES of the TOP 100 games (not the position), you will realize that the spread between the first and the last is very narrow: #1 scores 8.8 and #100 scores 7.5. Looking at the scores and not at the position puts everything in a totally different perspective. 7.5 is actually an excellent score. If you consider that the score is based on a wide range of the most diverse attributes including art, music, theme, you can clearly realize that all those machines provide an amount of pinball experience that is not too different.

Often there are heated discussions on which is the best pin, and even among experts there is little consensus even about the most popular machines. In my opinion this depends from the fact that THEMING plays a HUGE role in our appreciation of a machine, but we do not consciously completely realize it. The same can be probably said about MUSIC (I am personally hugely influenced by it). For other people can be ART. So if you fall in love, let's say, for a machine's art, you will be probably biased evaluating the other aspects of the machine. If the gameplay is poor, you will not probably rate it as brilliant, but you will probably rate it as good. And so on and so forth.

Having said that, the TOP 100 Pinside ranking is very "short". The spread between #1 and #50 is 0.9 (8.8 - 7.9), and from #51 to #100 is 0.3 !!!! (7.9 - 7.6). Very small difference.

I think that this explains a lot, and that we should probably taking it easy when discussing "best" games, rankings and similar topics.

But on the other hand, considering also all the manipulations discussed in the previous thread linked above, we have the scientific proof that the TOP 100 ranking does not prove much. Have all those machines their own merits? Or have all owners given top scores to their own machines (and bad scores to others), ending up leveling the whole lot off?

It looks like everybody agree that as it is the TOP 100 is, for many different reasons, completely unreliable. That is my main point.

Some agreed, some not. or we disagreed about the reasons for the unbalancing of the ranking.

In this thread as you can see the consensus is towards the complete unreliability of the TOP 100.

Agreed. Too many subjective factors really: theme, art, music, gameplay style (stop and go / flow), player's knowledge and skills, nostalgia and so on... All SUBJECTIVE factors, little space for an objective ranking really.

Having said that, I repeat what stated above: the existing TOP 100 list is very "short" in terms of SCORING. From 8.8 to 7.5 is very tight. So the list can just give a rough idea of machines that should not be too bad. Then you should choose the machines with the attributes you prefer: especially the theme is key for everybody I think. Then art, music, pinball generation (EM, early SS, DMD), and so on, according to each one's tastes.

Totally agree. Most of the people here discovered pinball only few years ago (not many with long time, in depth PLAYING knowledge over hundreds of machines). I suppose they started rating machines after few months owning or playing their first machines. Maybe they properly knew only a few machines, with a very limited experience. So their evaluation is not really reliable.
This is why, as I stated in the previous thread about rankings, I believe that maybe only a recognized, unbiased, very experienced pinball expert could write such a list. It would be still a subjective list, but still more reliable than the mess we have now. Something similar to a journalist writing about music or something. In that case you know the name of the person who wrote the list, and in case he is a famous critic you also know his tastes and probably his biases, so it would be easier for a reader to assess the meaning of such a ranking.

Here on Pinside I found a pinsider called Caucasian2Step who rated more than 700 machines and looks to me like very knowledgeable. I often check his ranking.

In order:

- checking the # machine's position in the ranking: unuseful and misleading
- checking the machine's overall score: more useful, but still very incomplete
- checking the machine's sub-category scores: bit more useful
- reading comments and try to distinguish between the reliable ones and the heavily biased ones: useful
- reading qualified comments or from people you directly know and trust: gives a possibly reliable idea of the machine
- play the machine: very useful
- play the machine extensively: do that and forget all the rest