The two games play pretty much the same. There's nothing about the pro game play that's better. I just sold my pro and bought a premium this week and am not finding a difference.

I do not believe the pro is faster or slower. The woodbury shot is not made often so it is not much of a game changer either way having a drop target there. Between the two games, I do not believe the pro is harder. In fact the pro is easier because:
1) Bicycle girl mode: the pro you shoot the ramp which is a safer shot than hitting a bash toy where the ball sometimes comes down uncontrollable.
2) Well walker magnet: this tosses the ball down the drain. Makes the pro easier.
3) Woodbury drop target: hitting this is a quick ricochet back down the middle on the premium. It's very dangerous.

The walker bombs are the only thing that make the premium easier. I was able to (for example) restart horde after a double drain using them. I guess for this reason perhaps the difficulty can be marked a wash between the two.

I will also say that out of the box, my pro played great. Out of the box, my premium played terrible and wasn't at all fun. It took a whole day of tweaking to get things playing great (was worth it, but sure was a hassle).

I upgraded this week from a pro to premium only for this feature. It's a game changer much like acdc vip pass. The feature has nothing to do with BOM of the parts.

Just last night, I was playing a game and on ball 3, around 150 mil points, I was in prison multiball (maybe stacked with blood bath). I double drained and my game should have ended. I noticed the lit button on my lockdown bar and quickly button mashed it. I was able to restart prison multiball due to add-a-ball and ended up making it to horde and ended up at about 600 mil. This feature is worth it alone and is a strategic game changer. This is why we love Lyman games.

Using the start button would be super lame. First, you can hit the start button without taking your hands off the flippers - which is the point of this feature. Second, route ops care more about people being able to add players than use walker bombs. Third, this has nothing to do with stern tricking people. The game feature was conceived by the software lead while he was playing the game. It was not conceived in a business meeting to determine how to force more premium sales.

My bicycle ramp works perfectly. Works as well as my pro ramp did. There's nothing to complain about here once you solve any potential issues and install the fix kit. It's true that more mechanical features may result in more tweaking or fixes needed. But this isn't a valid reason to not have a version of the game. The game is a game of shooting zombies. You need as many bash toys here as possible.

Couldn't agree more. I hate this magnet and have disabled it.

The crossbow works fine and is a cool feature. Added in with the other premium features it's definitely value add.

Again, not that BOM matters, but these are definitely not $10 parts. The drop target, for example, requires a target, a switch, a target reset coil, a bracket, perhaps an aux board for added coils, and N hours of programming to make it all work.

To be honest, you can add a fish tank to your pro. And I think the premium GI light show is terrible. The red GI looks awful. The pro can have all warm whites in the GI which are then always on and look great. The reds on the premium just look terrible and color bomb the hell out of the plastics. I managed to swap all these with frosted reds to tone down the color bombing and it looks better. But I could easily live without the GI light show.

The rgb arrow inserts, however, add a lot to the game as different colors means different things on actual game play shots. Green arrows during multiball stacked with some modes, for example tell you it's time for super jackpots.

I agree that if you're happy with the pro you should stick with it. It's great to save money. But saving money is a separate issue than degrading the upgrades and arguing they are not worth having. Many of us are out of space so adding another game is not a consideration and many of us don't find $1500 to be a life changing amount of money. The pro is a great machine. But the premium is definitely superior and worth the additional costs of you can afford them.

Keep in mind also that people usually don't keep a game for the rest of their lives. A used premium will fetch ~$1500 over a used pro so you'd get all that money back on sale. I'm not saying you will always get all your money back, but the difference between premium and pro you will.

I always hate this reference to arguing to justify a purchase. It's dumb and false. Obviously a premium owner thinks the premium is better or he woulda bought the pro. The pro owner should have valid reasons for not upgrading of he woukda bought the premium. In this case, I think the pro is a great machine. I prefer having no magnet on well walker (easily fixed) and hate the prem GI (not easily fixed but easily made manageable). Features I love on the prem are walker bombs, crossbow, bicycle ramp, and color rgb inserts.

Yea I don't think so. Again, walker bombs was a feature conceived of by Lyman as he played the game on his own. It was not something decided in a business meeting and deployed by "Stern" to cause more sales of the higher models.