Keep playing... bring a friend over and watch them play too!

Oh, and Beer... there should be beer!
faz

(seriously... keep playing. more practice)

Watch someone better than yourself play, even if that means watching a video. Sometimes there is something missing in approach or technique that you're not going to think of or integrate unless you see it done. To paraphrase Cal Ripken, "Practice doesn't make perfect. Perfect practice makes perfect."

Give MM a rest for a couple of weeks. Play your other machines, then go back to it.

Aim for specific shots over and over, try and start Barnyard MB, try and set a new record for jousts, peasants, damsels, etc. but only focus on one per game.
That will help you get your eye in on each of the shots, and relearn the shots after a break.

You take your fist and smash it through the glass. This seems to work just about everytime.

If you dig the game keep playing it.
Inevitably you will get in a groove and have a crazy game where you crush your high score.
It’s almost like a religious experience.

One last bit of advice. Fully understand the rules. And the hidden tasks/treasures in the game.

The deeper the rules the more you need to know to score really big.

Lots of videos out there.... PAPA, etc. Got a rule sheet?

http://pinball.org/rules/medievalmadness.html

faz

One big difference between MM and the others you've mentioned, is that MM has pretty linear scoring. Your score is tied much more closely to how long your game lasts, rather than if you happened to stack multiple crazy scoring features at once (6x + loopin supers, or PKE, or We Came We Saw, etc).

What is the feed like from the swamp, and do you regularly get control from it, or do you fling the ball away on the fly?

This is good. If you can almost always get it under control, then doing castles all day is the best strategy for high scores. In tournament play, it's rare to see anything else.

This is probably true of a lot of games. Eventually you'll miss and hit a post at the mouth of a ramp, which can be deadly. Can you hold up a flipper to transfer a ball moving quickly down the inlane over to the other flipper? I often do this from left to right on MM.

I (almost always) refuse to shoot the castle from the right flipper when the drawbridge is down because I've had too many STDM returns. Can you post past reliably and shoot it from the left? I find the return is much, much safer that way.

I've plateaued on my most modern games which are also the most technically challenging. Part of that is because I've had a pretty good sized collection for a few years so I'm always playing different machines throughout the week. Now, however, I've decided to focus a bit more on a just few.

I don't want it to feel like work, as though I'm training for something. I want it to be fun, so I add an extra ball (4 instead of 3), install an easier mode if that's an option or tweak features like various ball save times, and tighten the out lanes. This gets me past my plateau, and makes a game feel really fresh again. After doing this for a while, I can see how going back to the factory settings will also feel fresh and become more fun for knowing better where it all leads.