I wish more games had multiple options to fit the wide variety of player skills and settings between location, home, and tournament. What is there is mostly minor variations of the same core code.

Like let an operator set a location game to default to novice mode if they know it's mostly novices at the location (something like unlimited balls and a hard three minute time limit). But let the pinball players know that doing something like holding down the left flipper button while pressing start opens up additional options for how they might want to play the game (traditional play, tournament play, co-op play, and other differently coded modes of game)

Of course it might not help increase sales that much, but I still think it would be beneficial to multiple people in the hobby overall.

It'd be interesting if pinball adopted a percentage complete statistic. Games that don't easy lend themselves to scores will often include a percentage of how much of the content has been finished.

It would also work well whenever games can connect online and provide some modicum of persistent player progression over multiple sessions. Persistent player progression tracking pioneered by Call of Duty 4 has become the standard in video games. Even if you have a bad game, you're still progressing towards *something* (and combine this concept with the right theme, such as Pokemon, and you have a bona-fide hit)

An achievement system would be incredible for games like JJ POTC. Achievements for exploring the wide breadth of content, trying different character combos, getting rare rewards, etc... It would always give the player something else to shoot for.

Yes people can take off the glass and cheat. Yet people cheat online all the time and it still hasn't stopped video games from greatly benefiting from connected play.

Different strokes for different folks. I'm in that limbo spot skillswise where I can crush any beginner, can have fun competing with a small group of similarly skilled players, but get crushed by the very skilled players. So I'm not that interested in playing with the people who crush me, I fully understand why the people I crush aren't interested in playing with me, and I only have a small group of people to play with in a hobby that is already niche. It's about having the option. No one is trying to take away the traditional high score attack style of competitive play.

I get it, you don't like it. You've made your opinion clear and add nothing to the conversation other than pointing out it would take a modicum of effort. (Also I don't take your opinion seriously if you're not a programmer)

Stern keeps rising the prices and for what? If we aren't going to get impressive hardware, we can at least get impressive software.

I think you design around it. The barrier to cheat is so low that you have to accept that in the design of any online features. It pretty much makes public high score boards meaningless without adding a lot of unnecessary hardware. But people could still have a "friend's list" to compare their scores with other friends that they have some level of trust with. Personal achievements and the ability to continue progress forward would still be meaningful for people that want to engage with it. The serious competitive players and any TD that has organized a large event would love games that could automatically report scores back to the software running the tournament.

Yeah, sorry for going so far off topic.

Of all the new features that have been discussed, co-op is by far one of the easiest. At best it sells some more games and increases coin drop on location. At worst it wastes a couple of days of a coder's and tester's time. I don't know how Stern has designed their code base, but I'd think it could be able to be implemented in multiple games fairly quickly.

Ok so have a large caveat when comparing scores to scores of different machines. Still plenty of other benefits to going online. I think any operator that wouldn't be interested in being able to remotely update the game, check status reports, check audits and coin drop, and remotely adjust pricing and game features is lying. (Digital security of course has to be on point)

I did mention testers in my message. But even then, it's not like they're testing an all new game with multiple features happening at once. Plus Stern has gotten pretty good at getting people in the community to beta test their software for free.

Did that mode do anything besides add up the scores of player 1 and 3 vs player 2 and 4? Like if player 1 locks 2 balls, would player 3 be able to use the help of player 1 to start a multiball quicker?

TNA co-op is everyone is working together on the same game progression. If player 1 takes out 2 reactors and drains, then player 2 starts on reactor 3 and not reactor 1.

Getting to particular wizard modes would be great for co-op. The idea of easily playing a co-op Valinor run on location is tantalizing.

That said, part of the appeal of TNA co-op is the ease of explaining the gameplay loop. It’s a great game for showing people to new pinball that there’s more to it than keeping the ball alive.

You haven't seen a lot of modern employee contracts then. Typically the employer gets first rights to whatever you make even if it's on your off time, but especially if you ever do anything remotely related to the project during company time or on company equipment (which can be as innocuous as replying to an project-related personal email on your work issued phone)

Stern Jurassic Park is another game ripe for co-op play. Everyone trying to get to the end of the map? Perfect. (Still a bit too obtuse to explain to novice players, but the core gameplay loop lends itself well)

An interesting challenge would be how could a programmer spread around "the love" of a game. ie giving the players who are clearly performing worse better rewards, easier multiball starts, rebalanced scoring and mode progression, etc... Some sort of dynamic difficulty level to make sure everyone is getting to do something fun, see the ball do neat things, and finish a ball feeling like they contributed to the team more than weighed it down. Of course, this would actually be challenging to design and require a lot more thought and resources. (Or at the very least at the beginning of the game, assign a difficulty level to each player)

I think Henry Ford once said, "If I'd asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, 'A faster horse!'" People don't know what they want until you show it to them. People aren't clamoring for co-op and other new ways to play because the implementations are so few and far between.

To Stern's credit, they did a great job of making attract videos that explain the most basic aspects of operation. A few games, most notably Elwin's, take it further by explaining a few of a particular game's core objectives. They used to have the QR codes for getting cheat sheets for rules and need to bring it back.