If you want to understand "The Myth", I will give you a little history, before this post gets buried with thousands of garbage postings on this website such as The End of Stern 2017, "which game should I buy", "My game is better than your game", Look at my LEDs (I blind my friends and wife), See my powdercoated underwear, or "X versus Y" (even though neither game title has been released).
I don't participate in polls either.
BLUF: It is not a "myth", it is a reality.
If a person dissects the layout and design of the game (which many people will not, including owners), particularly coming out of the three pop bumpers and off the mini playfield, and have both outline posts set liberally at equal levels, etc, etc your left lane will always have a higher audit. If a right lane has a higher audit, or even close there is something wrong on the game setup.
A ratio calculation lane is complicated by a number of factors a person cannot necessarily easily determine such as playfield condition, alignment of wireforms, angle of the playfield, skill of the player, pop bumper assemblies rebuilds, and so on, so good luck with that one.
I am not considering any "slap saves".
If BLY/WMS engineers could not figure it out in 1990s, it is not going to happen now.
When the game was tested by Pat Lawlor during the final design phase in 1993, the ratio was roughly 1.25 to 1.
I don't know what the ratio was on play testing before the game went into production, as I do not know how the games were set up for play in the first place (see point above), but I assume it was very close, as the engineers wanted to see what happened with REAL players, good and bad.
If someone has 3 to 1, then there is no left outline post at all, or the right line is completely conservative, while the left is liberal.
Whatever the case, the game is not setup correctly.
The reverse is also true, unless an owner is completely blocking lanes, which also makes no sense.
You get the picture here.
This ultimately affected a future decision made by Mr. Lawlor directly during game production, and has relevance to this question.
The whole "which game playfields have post holes near the pop bumpers" story follows through this point, if you do not understand to what I am referring and lightly discussed by Ted Estes. Lawlor made the post "optional" for this region of the PF for operators who thought it was "unfair" based on operator reports, and all remaining production playfields were drilled and plugged, well over 3/4 of the production run. Most operators did not install the post kit, for maximum earnings, did not read the bulletin, never got the bulletin update, or did not care, and kept the hole plugged, thereby draining the ball more often out of the game on the left side. Total numbers are unknown that have undrilled PFs, but are suspected to be only the first several thousand. Remember nobody really kept those kind of records, just production numbers.
"And now you know...the rest of the story...good day?"
- Paul Harvey