I don't think we will in five years either. I have had three Spike machines (still have two) and have never had a node board problem (Zero defects, Spike is perfect!). That means just as little as one guy having two machines and having node board issues on both (100% crap! Spike is doomed). Without a reasonable, verifiable sample size of people with Spike pins with issues vs those without, it is kind of meaningless.

Personally, I will continue to buy Spike games because I think the issue is overblown on here, people will always post their problems vs successes so it presents a bit of a skewed reality. The vast majority of complaints on here have also been resolved, by Stern, for free even if out of warranty.

However, I think everyone would be a lot less concerned if Stern just dropped the profit margin on the boards. If you design a system where you expect the solution to problems to be simply swapping in a new board, the boards should be way more reasonable. I am all in favor of making a profit, but a $1000.00 cpu board is ridiculous. Feels like a cash grab at the expense of your customers so they won't have a several thousand dollar paper weight.

Read through the threads on here where people have indicated node board failures, and there are many posts indicating people have received replacement node boards for free. Is it hard "data"? No, but if hard data/evidence is required for a discussion of Spike reliability I guess everyone should just stop because no one other than Stern has any real data.

I never said there was no evidence of spike boards failing. What is the real problem though? Is it a 1% failure rate? What percentage of the failure rates happen out of warranty? Random posts on Pinside cannot provide that information, so deciding to not buy a pin based on the Spike system is an overreaction as far as I am concerned.

If they do, then I will try to fix, get someone more knowledgeable to try to fix, or buy a replacement if that fails. If there isn't a replacement available then I would definitely lose my sh*t and probably never buy another Spike pin again, but I just don't feel the risk of this worst case scenario is all that high. I agree (and posted previously) that a good supply of boards at a reasonable price is all it would take to alleviate everyone's concerns. Hope it happens. Until then I am just going to enjoy playing pinball.

To each their own though, it is a lot of cash so everyone has to decide on their own comfort level.

I wish that someone in the pinball media like SDTM, TWIP or H2H could get an interview with Gomez to talk specifically about the node board concerns, maybe open up to the community a bit about real world Spike failure rates, board costs, availability, etc.

It is great they did finally release schematics, but not for all boards, and I have a vague recollection of Gomez talking about better troubleshooting methods, etc. but not sure what has materialized. It is weird Stern as a company doesn't try to get in front of this stuff, the concerns have been ongoing for years now. Some information and support direct from them would probably result in some fence sitters purchasing new machines and existing owners relaxing a bit.