Mods can be easily over done but there are some that are worth the high price. The Tron arcade mod for example. Expensive,but very cool and worth every penny.

the problem here I think is camp B is so active. Camp A talk sinks to the bottom so fast, nobody sees it except the poster. and that's 1% of the talk around here.

yes the Tron mod is excellent and tastefully done. One of the better ones out there.

My experience with a topper is a bad one. I had one crash right through the playfield glass on one my games around 8 years ago. No more toppers!

What we are talking about here is the growing rift of new pin heads that come in at the new prices . They are ready and able to pay and also like the newer feel of LEDs and bling. The rise in nib sales numbers proves its not that small of a minority .
The rift exist mainly because the old school buyer had a routed resource and could get in cheap and with a little work have a collection . Sadly even though they kept the hobby alive it is leaving them behind. Games are HUO mainly. Expensive to start with and not providing much of the routed venue to jump in cheaper.

excellent point - this is going to cause friction more and more as time goes on. In the past, our games were cheap because they were dumped second hand by the operators and went through a few cycles. Now, the inventory is almost exclusively going to be HUO.. that alone will drive prices on titles of the last few years significantly higher than the previous expectation of a DMD game for 1-3k.

As the first time buyers pay more.. and have no operating revenue to offset their costs.. its difficult to sell for a loss. Combine that with the 'fresh meat' coming into the hobby willing to pay... the prices will stay high even for 2nd or 3rd hand pins.

The loss of onlocation pinball drives up prices - further agitating the traditional hobbyist.

That is a bit of the function of how this site is setup though. This site is setup to always display new posts across all forums by default .. as the view everyone gets to start with. This is very different from the traditional forums where people would dive into a forum topic first and then see the topic list.

The negative to this is.. whatever is most frequent will always dominate the newsfeed. There are tools to change the view.. but the majority won't customize their view.

what was the name of the other website that provided a web view into RGP?

RGP Archive, Google

LTG : )

thx LTG.. it was rgparchive I was trying to think of.