I agree with this for skills, but eventually WoF will infuriate you with its bankrupts and randomness. It is not a desert island game if you ever hope to escape with your sanity!
But yes, it’s a really good game for working on that mix of EM nudging skills, accuracy, and strategic thinking.
I think you misspelled “Dragon” there. BAO.
I would suggest World Poker Tour here as a game that has aspects of all 3. Main playfield has both the very long ramp/orbit/scoop shots and a wide array of drop targets to practice on. The upper pf has 2" flippers in a standard configuration–not a full playfield but a short bouncy one that gives good practice for the reflexes.
I’ll second WPT as a good training game. It requires a variety of demanding flipper skills as well as quick thinking and precise timing in order to score decent points.
Takes me to school most every day!
Yeah, as I don’t have the income or the space to have a machine of my own, I have to rely on machines out in public. nd when I’m paying for each game, I’m a lot more averse to risky stuff.
I know I don’t have to be gentle with the machines, but I’m just a very cautious person in general, so the one thing I am very afraid to practice on is nudging. I know I won’t seriously damage the machines or knock them over or anything, but there is a mental lock inside my head that stops me from doing anything rougher than a slap on the side knowing I’m playing on someone else’s machine.
I am totally not an expert on this, but one thing that helped me get over a similar feeling was finding a group of folks to play with who were waaaay better than me. I ended up joining a local league after meeting a few awesome people, and now league nights are one of the things I look forward to most each week. Watching people up close who really know how to play definitely helped me realize that confident nudging is a core part of the game.
One other interesting thing happened as I’ve worked on gettin my nudge skills up — I realized that I was doing it way too hard and way too often. It’s not like I was shaking out tilt warnings or anything, but I was frequently nudging with an excess that would routinely send the ball right back into the outlanes. After I watched the better league players more closely, I realized they were way more subtle than I was making it out to be for myself.
All that’s to say — go try it! If you need somewhere to start, I can recommend what I did: whenever you see the ball heading for the top corner of the slings, or toward an outlane post, just use your palms to give a small forward push on the lock bar. Barely get the rubbers to touch the ball and reverse the momentum — it’s honestly a matter of millimeters. Get used to that move and the feeling of steering the ball out of danger. After that, figuring out how to nudge the machine around just gets more and more intuitive as time goes on. Good luck!
BSD! LOVE NEVER DIES! 
A game that is fun and appealing to you. And which is in better than decent condition. A lot of games will do.
Bet on something you want to play over and over. And with clean playfield and ramps that allow consistency without too much random bull. You will not be a better player facing a lot ramp rejects to much frustration. Or ball ghosting. Or flipper hops.
Get er newer Stern with safe shots and good flow that return balls to flippers.
Try not to go for a bastardised game or a notorious (but famous) title like BSD. A hard game will just discourage you. Go for lengthy ball times. Set the game harder as you go along.
The tilt should not be too friendly. Getting used to a loose tilt will punish you on tournament day.
Expert players might want to go for games which tests certain skills. I mean, if you want to play with fast orbit returns/loop pass you need a HS2, AFM or something similar.
Yeah, that’s a mindset you need to break for competitive play. Remember that the operator of the machine (whether it’s at an arcade, bar, or tournament location) has elected to set the tilt bob to a level that (hopefully) represents how much nudging they’re comfortable with. The machine itself will judge you with tilt warnings and/or TILT if you go past that limit. Part of the fun of competitive play is learning exactly how far you can take a particular machine, and then working it to your advantage just under that limit!
And also remember that these are industrial quality machines. I’ve seen people walk on them (!), pick them up and slam them down, and other horrifying things, with no real problem. I’m certainly not encouraging any of those extreme actions, but just know that they’re pretty sturdy devices, designed to be placed in abusive environments. Certainly any reasonable nudges/slaps/etc you might do during normal gameplay are solidly within their designed operating limits.
Any nudging using you hands only and to an extend where the machine does not lift a foot or slide on the floor is absolutely unharmful to the machine. And should be widely accepted as within the bounderies of playing pinball.
If you encounter game owners (or location managers) who feel otherwise, respect their wishes and consider if you want to play at their house/tournament again. If they are on a friendly tone you may explain to them the nature of nudging as an element of the game.
Hmm, all right, so it’s usually a push forwards. I’m guessing there’s some amount of finesse to this, because I will occasionally find people out in public whom I’m seeing vigorously nudging the machine every few seconds (I’m guessing every time the ball reaches the bottom third of the playfield). Their scores are almost always no better than mine, and I never nudge to any real effect.
How do you tell if the nudging has made any difference?
Yeah, I’ve seen children climb up onto the glass and dance around on them too without the glass cracking (though they do produce a lot of scratches).
It’s those thin little legs and the tall backbox that makes a pinball machine look like it has a high center of gravity. They look like they can fall over if you so much as sneeze on them, but they tend to slide around the floor instead. It’s weird.
Follow-up question: If the machines are on carpet, are they more prone to falling over? Usually, I see these machines on concrete or tile, but pretty often, they’ll be on carpet, especially if they’re in bowling alleys or movie theaters.
(I’m a total klutz, so I’ve become very apprehensive about making sure I don’t damage anything.)
You won’t knock a machine over from your normal playing position. The games are so heavy that you’d need to stand on the side of the game and lift from the bottom to flip the game over.
Just move all you want within the tilt limits. You won’t hurt the game.
On carpet the game will be harder to slide, but you can still do it. Some operators will but little plastic cups on the feet of the games. These prevent you from sliding the game across the floor, but you can still move the game (because it’s top heavy it’ll just sort of wobble without the legs moving)
Good call — there is definitely a level of finesse involved that is just as much about knowing when to leave it alone than when to bump it a bit.
I wouldn’t say it’s always a push forwards — only that it was the most accessible place to for me to start, personally. Once I got comfortable with the timing and how the push would bounce the ball up, seeing a path toward better control started to get a little more clear. The direction in which you emphasize the push definitely matters, but only once you’re used to making the push itself.
The only way to tell if it’s making a difference is to start recognizing scenarios where you would drain if you didn’t touch the machine at all. I started by focusing on the slings and outlanes. Any time the ball was going toward the top of the sling (the little rounded bit, not the flat part) or toward an outlane post, I just tried to push forward at the right time — the goal is to get the ball to bounce up and off the rubbers and out of that area entirely.
That’s a really reductive strategy (and one that’s not always reliable or right), but it was one that helped me get my head around the whole dynamic. Once I got better at that, I started looking for ways to be more effective (which usually boiled down to subtleness). I think it’s all about anticipating where the ball might go once it hits the thing it’s headed towards, and what you can do to successfully change the trajectory. Unfortunately the only way to get good at recognizing that is to play a bunch 
Lots of folks will bang around on the machine because that’s what they’ve seen others do, or on TV or whatever. A little goes a long way. A lot of really good players in my league have such good touch that you’d barely notice their nudges unless you were watching them closely.
Anticipation is a skill you want to work in parallel to nudging. If you get into a free play situation, spend some time playing single handed. It helps you learn to read the feeds on the playfield and you often need to nudge a bounce pass to add energy to get it to the other flipper.
I remember my first big insight was when someone told me that you weren’t trying to nudge to steer the ball into the inlane, but that a nudge entirely out of the inlane-outlane area was a higher percentage move. Another place to start nudging is when you have a shot that returns around orbit where the normal feed hits the slingshot. A modest bump to the side of the machine can pull the ball off the wall, so it hits the flipper instead of the slingshot. Instant control where there used to be chaos. This applies to other feeds where you get a of wall to work with, and can be used to improve your odds with a failed ramp (if you can anticipate the problem soon enough).
I always practice loop passes off super skill shots while the ballsaver’s on. Like on Metallica, say.
One thing that helped me a lot in this regard was watching top down videos of top ranked players in competition. I highly recommend taking a couple of hours to watch a PAPA championship final round and trying to see what these players are doing. When I first started watching, a lot of the nudging is so subtle it didn’t look like they were doing anything at all. After a watching for a while though and listening to when the comentators call out a good save, you start to pick up on it.
I met you a year ago at the Lyons Spring Classic and told you to talk me out of wanting a WoF. You failed, and I finally just got one! Glad to see it come up in this thread.
When I first got into pinball I played Shadow, BSD, CFTBL, FT etc and I hated all of them with a passion. Actually when I bought my BSD I had serious buyers remorse for a while because it made a mockery of me on a daily basis. It wasn’t fun. I do think toughing it out and concentrating on getting better scores on BSD actually helped me improve. Now its setup with bouncy rubber, yellow post rubbers everywhere, outlane posts all the way up, no rubbers on inlane/outlane, steep and waxed. I feel good when I have a game over 200m. No pain no gain right?
Also, if you don’t know how to nudge don’t set your tilts tight. In my opinion not nudging at all and setting the tilt super tight are similar when you are learning to nudge. One of the biggest hurdles for me was going from not nudging at all to trying to nudge. A lot of newer players in our leagues have asked me how to nudge and I always say do something even if its wrong. If you set your tilt loose and learn to move the game exactly as much as you need to in order to save a ball your nudging will improve. You can always tighten it as you get better at nudging.
Heh, I’ve seen a lot of those videos, but I should watch for their subtle nudging then. I imagine it must be almost kind of an art form, something akin to an illusionist, where the best ones are subtle and calm.