Quoted from curban:My wife and I both started in the hobby at the beginning of 2019. We've definitely been sucked in, accumulating 14 machines and spending probably an-hour-or-more playing five days a week.
We have 6 modern Sterns (GB, SW, Aero, BM66, GOTG, IM) and haven't 'completed' any of them yet...and that's with moving the outlane posts in on all of them. I'm wondering how normal this is?
Interested in opinions:
- How common is it for owners to have not 'completed' their games with standard 3-ball games?
- What's the learning curve for pinball, in general - do players typically keep improving year-after-year - or do you pretty much plateau after X years
- What's the typical learning curve for a modern game - how many plays are typical for typical players before they 'complete' all of the goals on a modern machine?
- We both just celebrated 49th bdays. Is pinball like other sports where natural skills/abilities begin declining after peaking in 20's or 30's? Why?
- Maybe sexist-loaded question: I know tourneys are split between men & women. Do men statistically score better on average than women? Why would this be the case? Is it just a larger pool of players? Women have more important things to do than play pinball all day? Something else?
Sure would like to complete a Wizard mode on one of these Sterns some day!
I used to be a semi-pro gamer and was recruited by a professional team but after playing with them just a few times I realize there was so little fun and so much stress involved that I nearly stopped playing entirely.
During the year previous I played the same game about 60 hours a week. At the time I was a student so I could afford to just game 24/7 and that amount of play is how I reached that level of skill.
I can assure you that the real difference between most professionals and casual players is if you can afford to do something constantly and consistently you will probably get extremely good, very fast.
I find the problem is the fun factor usually goes down.
Tournaments occasionally can be fun, but playing for enjoyment versus playing to win yields very different levels of fun.
Just enjoy your games; you’ll get better over time. Don’t focus on always “winning” or you’ll just burn yourself out.
