Pingolf: example goals and setting advice

General
42

I was hoping we could have a Pin-Golf Wiki Topic. It would list the machine with both score based and objective based formats. For example I want to run an objective based event at the local gamebar and it would be nice to reference a list so I don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Knowing which games work well and which objectives work well would be helpful. Let me know your thoughts?

Here are the games I have to work with below and I’m looking at using objective based:

Bally - Addams Family
Bally - NBA Fastbreak
Bally - Safe Cracker (should be replaced with Batman ‘66 soon)
Bally - Theatre of Magic
Bally - Twilight Zone
PPS - Attack from Mars R
PPS - Medieval Madness R
Spooky - Total Nuclear Annihilation
Stern - Deadpool Pro
Stern - Iron Maiden Pro
Stern - Metallica Pro
Stern - The Pabst Can Crusher
Stern - Tron
Williams - Bram Stoker’s Dracula
Williams - The Machine: Bride of Pin·bot (Should be replaced by Mousin’ Around! soon)
Williams - Monster Bash
Williams - Junk Yard
Williams - Star Trek TNG
Williams - Tales of the Arabian Nights
Williams - Terminator 2
Williams - White Water

43

I put players in pairs and all the games are active at once thus there are always pairs waiting around to jump on a game that frees up. This way the machines are always busy so in my experience I haven’t had any backups. You still get bottlenecks if one of the machines is too long playing, at the end a lot of people will be standing around waiting to play that machine.

44

Score based really depends on the standard of the playing group and the setup difficulty for the machine. I find that score targets should be much lower than one would expect because of

  1. the pressure of a tournament
  2. players only get one go at the machine, ie they walk up and they get no time to get dialled in on the flippers for that particular machine

These two factors drastically lowers scores. The last pingolf tourney I ran I deliberately set scores very low and all but the best players still complained the scores and objectives were too hard to achieve.

Pingolf is not popular in my area and I suspect it is because most people feel like failures when they play it.

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45

This is what I was talking about… if you don’t pile groups onto every game, then the longer playing games don’t end up with a huge line after everyone has finished the shorter playing ones.

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46

If the most players are taking 5s on holes, then it makes sense people would feel like failures.

On the other hand, to me, Pingolf is great because it’s one of the few ways you can walk away from a pinball machine with success (because you reached the goal while still having balls left to play). In other formats, your ball ends with a drain, and you have failed to keep the ball in play and continue earning points (unless you come from behind on the final ball of the game and can walk away without playing it out).

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47

I don’t play a lot of pingolf so maybe this is super common and just new to me. We played on exclusively three ball games and you recorded a score of 4 if you got half way to the score objective. You only took the full 5 if you didn’t get half way. It removed a lot of 5’s so you didn’t feel like you accomplished nothing if you got somewhat close to the target, plus it added a bit of strategy for your last ball if you were close to the halfway point.

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48

Here’s my holes from a couple weeks ago, holes were arranged as one per machine for holes 1-6 and then a second on each machine for 7-12. 1 stroke for ball 1, etc, 4 if you fail. EBs plunged.

Jjpotc - start 2x playfield (playing easier inlane character was prohibited)
Jjpotc - qualify dead men tell no tales MB (playing easier mb character was prohibited)
Dr dude - earn reflex jackpot (-1 stroke for each increase of the jackpot before earning)
Dr dude - start multiball
Iron maiden - light revive
Iron maiden - start 2x playfield
Johnny mnemonic - start multiball
Johnny mnemonic - light spinner millions
Addams family - score THING (-1 stroke for each star)
Addams family - earn 3x bonus
Tna - destroy a reactor
Tna - earn two mystery awards (this should have been just one, i didn’t know you had to hit the rad targets in order)

I think score based goals are significantly less fun, but also wanted to take the opportunity to teach the other players in my league things about the game they might not know.

49

Compared to the rest of your objectives, this is a rules knowledge test and is much easier than everything else. I assume it was set up as such?

50

The score sheets had instructions for each hole on the back and coaching was explicitly encouraged

It also was not the easiest objective, according to scoring average

Iron maiden 2x and Johnny Mnemonic multiball had the lowest average scores.

51

Praise be to Pintel, Patron Saint of people who like action button management!

Actually, wait… these were multiplayer groups, I assume. That’s explicitly not fair for pingolf qualifying standards…

Edit: I guess this brings up a fair point about JJPOTC in Pingolf - how can we make objectives such that you aren’t shoehorned into too many character choices for qualifying? In finals the gloves are off - pick order can be chosen and strategy can be involved - but in qualifying it should be player vs. machine with other players there for the communal golf feel.

52

I edited my original post to add that Pintel was prohibited for the 2X playfield hole, and the easier MB characters were prohibited for the multiball hole.

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53

Makes perfect sense then! Not a bad way to get around a lot of the character interactions if you want to express certain rules in the game from a teaching standpoint but keep it competitive.

This is what is really cool about objective pingolf: you can learn a ton about interactions and features that you might not otherwise know about. I remember using the 10M skill shot on TZ to partially circumvent a door panel objective; that strategy caught on like wildfire once it was out in the open!

54

Your goals were mostly extremely difficult IMO, especially on 3 ball. What were your averages?

55

I don’t think the goals are too challenging overall (Except the TNA goal) but I suppose the proof is in the pudding.

We leaned towards harder goals because our venue is coin drop and we were concerned that easy goals, achieved on ball 1, would feel like a serious waste of money. We may have ended up weighing that concern too heavily.

The average for all players was 3.59. Our two newest players did not achieve any of the goals. Only one player averaged under 3, and no holes averaged under 3. Two TNA Mystery Awards was not achieved by anyone, nor was the Dr Dude Reflex Jackpot. (The Dr Dude reflex jackpot was achieved on ball 1 and ball 2, respectively, by the two course testers during their practice run.) We had 16 players in the tournament. Another thing to note is that JM and TNA were recently added to the barcade, and not in our previous league season, i.e. pretty or brand new to most of the field. Full report below.

Average scores per hole:

  1. POTC - qualify DMTNT MB - 3.81
  2. Dr Dude - Start MB - 3.75
  3. Iron Maiden - Spell REVIVE - 3.31
  4. JM - Light Spinner Millions - 3.38
  5. Addams - Collect Thing - 3.44
  6. TNA - Destroy a reactor - 3.44
  7. POTC - Start 2X pf - 3.88
  8. Dr Dude - Earn Reflex JP - 4
  9. Iron Maiden - Start 2X PF - 3.06
  10. JM - Start MB - 3.19
  11. Addams - Earn 3x Bonus - 3.81
  12. TNA - Collect 2 mystery awards - 4
56

I’m sure I posted this somewhere earlier in this thread, but I’ve always aimed for objective based goals could be reached in 5 or 6 shots. Many of yours are 10+.

But overall, none of that matters if the players had fun and weren’t frustrated. Those averages tell me that most players, on most games, didn’t reach the goal. (Those same averages would look a lot better on 5 ball, because it would mean that many goals were reached on balls 4 and 5, which is still a success for the player). What did the players think?

57

my impression throughout the tournament and afterwards was that they had fun, but it’s hard to know if you’re receiving honest feedback if you’re the tournament runner. there was a level of frustration but good-natured and people enjoyed the format/style.

I don’t agree with your assessment of 10+ shots per, but i suppose that’s a matter of interpretation.

by hole, map to above list:

  1. 2-5 shots depending on strength/cleanness
  2. 8 shots (or some nice bouncing around the mixmaster reduces)
  3. 3-5 on this particular machine
  4. 6 shots
  5. 4 shots from lower flipper, 3 shots from upper flipper
  6. variable, 1-7+
  7. 8
  8. variable, ~6-8
  9. 5
  10. 5
  11. 4
  12. 8
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58

The Dory Hill Pinball Campout just wrapped up for 2019 (and the event didn’t happen in 2018), so I wanted to post the goals and averages along with my notes for where I screwed up.

All games were set on five balls. If you didn’t reach the goal in 5, you got a 6. All games were played by 48 players, except holes 9, 17, 18, and 26, which were played by 72 players. (There were 96 total players).

Hole Game Avg Goal
1 Captain Fantastic 3.96 35,000
2 Cover Girl 3.00 250
3 Rolling Stones (Stern) 2.94 Start Album Multiball
4 X-Men 2.85 8,000,000
5 Andromeda 2.98 200,000
6 Centaur 3.25 400,000
7 Alien Star 4.31 200,000
8 Alien Poker 4.08 Collect Royal Flush at 2x (or more)
9 Rolling Stones (Bally) 3.04 100,000
10 Led Zeppelin 3.04 50,000 (Evel Knievel retheme)
11 Gorgar 3.13 Light 1-2-3-4
12 Viking 4.35 150,000
13 Lord of the Rings 3.23 Start Fellowship MB
14 Willy Wonka 4.10 Start Gobstopper MB
15 Jungle Queen 3.08 25,000
16 Old Chicago 4.17 35,000
17 Demolition Man 3.28 200,000,000
18 Wheel of Fortune 3.47 Start BONUS Mode or MB
19 Hot Doggin’ 2.67 75,000
20 Stars 2.46 35,000
21 Star Trek: TNG 3.15 100,000,000
22 Harlem Globetrotters 2.85 50,000
23 CFTBL 3.06 Three Letters in FILM
24 Cheetah 2.33 200,000
25 Radical 3.40 Spell RADICAL
26 Spring Break 3.29 500,000
27 Attack from Mars 3.10 Destroy 2 Saucers or MB
28 Aerosmith 2.77 Spell AEROSMITH
29 Genie 3.96 150,000
30 Jurassic Park (Stern) 2.90 25m or capture dinosaur
31 Oktoberfest 3.85 Spell OKTOBER & lock ball
32 Xenon 3.10 125,000
33 Beatles 2.71 600,000 or mode Super Jackpot
34 Top Score 4.15 25,000

The overall average was 3.27 per hole. So I’m extremely pleased with that.

Some notes:

Three of the games were mine, and those three were all among the six hardest holes. I should have someone else help set goals for my own machines…which ties in perfectly to the thing I always say: NEVER TRUST THE OWNER OF THE GAME for target advice.

Not trying to call anyone out if they happen to see this, but the example from this year was that one owner suggested a goal for their machine that was over 6x higher what I used. :slight_smile:

I tried to plan out many of these goals ahead of time, and there was no feasible way for me to go around and play all 34 games to figure out goals. In my opinion, the holes are most consistent when one person is coming up with them…so I didn’t want to part out goal setting to several different people.

In some cases, I went to posted scores from league nights and took the median score of all players as guidance for the target. In a lot of cases I googled “[game name] neverdrains” and then looked at qualifying scores. This was really helpful, but still a little bit trickier.

Game specific notes:

  • Cover Girl: Tilt ends game and a fair number of people tilted.
  • Alien Star: I had a tough time with this because one lit spinner was about 200-300k. You could do that in one flip (if it fell through right inlane) or two (if you had to shatz). In retrospect, it probably should have been like 100k because the only other way to get points is through MB. In an ideal world, the goal would have been to start multiball, unfortunately when the game is set to 5 ball, your ALIEN progress doesn’t carry. (I never intentionally set goals where progress doesn’t carry). So really, if you can shatz to the spinner, you’re getting it in one shot whether the target is 100k or 300k.
  • Alien Poker: I thought a royal flush on its own was too easy/boring and that you’d get automatic progress on your kings each ball with the plunge. I was also obsessed with doing this goal because it would teach people the best way to play the game. :slight_smile: I play this game very controlled and do a lot of staging on the right side, so it’s way more controllable for me than an average player. The wire under the upper flipper had been removed so there was a lot of scissoring.
  • Gorgar: I didn’t know that tilting would kill your progress and your 1-2-3-4 wouldn’t carry over. I learned that this is common for Williams games of that era, so I will try and keep that in mind in the future.
  • Viking: I used the median at TPF which was 150k. That turned out to be really high. I forgot that Classics at TPF was unlimited and I mistook the scores for a limited format (like the main, where people really only got 2ish attempts per game). Medians in limited qualifying seem to be a good starting point, but in unlimited qualifying, the median is not appropriate. I’d like to do more research here and come up with some guidelines for the future. Like maybe: use the median in very limited qualifying, but use the 25th percentile score for unlimited? For TPF, the 25th percentile score was 90k.
  • Spring Break: A little tricky because there is a 100k skill shot. So if you know about that, you can get a 5 without flipping. As I was getting help on the goal for this game, that led to suggestions for a much higher score, but I resisted and 500k ended up being the right goal. Just because there is an easy way to get to X score, doesn’t mean you can assume everyone knows that. If you aren’t getting 100k skillshots, you have to do a fair bit of playing to get to 500k.
  • Oktoberfest: I didn’t know anything about this game. Spelling FEST also lit the same lock, so it would have been better to make it spell: OKTOBER or FEST and then lock a ball on the left ramp…to avoid confusion.

In the past, I’ve had this idea that games play so wildly different (depending on setup) that you cannot compare scores from other events. I’m excited to discover that it works out pretty well to look at qualifying scores from other tournaments to help set goals and will probably rely on this pretty heavily in the future.

Maybe I/we can gather data and have a repository of suggested target scores/objectives for all games.

I’ve also found a new way of asking people for target suggestions: “Give me a goal that everyone playing in the tournament will achieve in 5 balls”. That line of thinking has led to much more accurate goals.

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59

3.28 balls to score 200,000 on Demo Man? As John Spartan would say, “WHAAAAAAAAAAA?”

60

Yep. Goal was a little too difficult. :slight_smile:

Unlimited qualifying at Yegpin. 57 out of 100 broke 200m.

https://www.neverdrains.com/yegpin2019/playerIndex.php?disp=game&sel=CPC&game=5

61

he’s commenting on your typo, 200,000 vs 200,000,000

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