I’d cancel until that stuff actually starts happening.
But the track record was so solid.
It’s a year subscription running out in October. Kinda moot at this point.
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No forum as of yet. You get exclusive videos and podcast (for the first 24-48 hours when they are released). You also get some sort of item for the year. This year it was a Coin. These are the only things I can think of that you get for $39.99.
Is it worth it? No, no it’s not. Save your money.
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Can confirm this is the case above - also seems to kill SIC on all the modded code versions.
Also confirm you don’t need a reader on all games to make home work; just a usb wireless adaptor and a 32G memory stick and one game with a reader - hope Stern turn this into a proper feature, will save many resources from our ailing planet and gives Stern some green credentials!
I use Scorbit for tournaments and all my games (JJP. Spooky, Bally, Stern electronics, WPC and Stern SAM even!) have Scorbit. I don’t understand why Stern is making it difficult to run, when we started building the Internet had we acted like this it would not exist for SIC to be a thing! I’m sure there must be a good reason but I can’t figure it out.
Regards,
Neil.
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A minor update: Stern rolled out milestone badges today. These include:
- The number of games of pinball you’ve played
- The number of days you’ve played (cumulatively)
- The number of days you’ve played in a row
Belated edit: these will be retroactively added to your account based on your previous activity (if you’ve played an IC game before this update).
Ordered Insider Connected yesterday. Today, just found out they are now apart of Ifpa Stern Rewards. FML.
How much of a discount?
Dont know, purchased at regular price, 5 min later I see the email from IFPA.
best ask Mr Sharpe- 
Just a heads up for people who have Insider Connected installed - the latest update for Spike 2 games makes games default to automatically updating themselves.
Earlier today, Stern announced two new features:
- If an operator with a Pro(fessional) account registers their location(s), they can host “official launch parties” - if a user logs into the new machine there, they’ll get a profile badge commemorating the occasion. All this starts when James Bond 007 launches.
- In addition (quoting directly from the press release), “locations will automatically have a high score leaderboard generated on their James Bond 007 pinball machines.” (I assume this’ll be the case for every new Stern game going forward.)
- Operators will also be able to view “tech alerts” regarding any connected machines at the locations they’ve registered, ranging from switch problems to bigger issues like a coin door being opened. This is intended to help prevent unneeded checkups and save operators the trouble (and cost).
I got an email linking to three videos outlining all of this, but only one is currently available. Once the others are unprivated, I’ll edit this post to include them.
10/31 EDIT: The other two videos were finally uploaded today.
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And yet… I still can’t change the time out of GMT in my pro account so that my play stats have any useful granularity.
Basically, I’m still 100% sorry I paid for any retrofit kits. They have provided no meaningful or easily recognizable increase in revenue, and I’d have no means to validate data on a smaller revenue increase since the operator portal was (and still is) useless for tracking earnings from day to day, week to week or month to month.
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Yes, I agree the usefulness for the operators is pretty well nonexistent. I should be able to see (relevant to my time zone).
Number / Average / Highest
Number of plays (today)
Number of plays (week)
Number of plays (mth)
Number of plays (year)
Number of plays (lifetime)
The alerts aren’t bad we got one today and it helps so a little more useful but there are a lot more stats they can pull out of the machine that they do not track in insider yet which is disappointing on the operator side of things anyway.
For me I would like to do cleaning, flips to do rebuilds, every x plays and would be nice to set that and have a text reminder to tell me it needs done or to be checked.
Agreed. Connected should have been able to pull plays from XX/XX/XX XX:XX to XX/XX/XX XX:XX when it launched yet we’re still waiting for even a time change so my saturday stats don’t start at 5PM.
And really I should also be able to compare say, Wednesday last week to Wednesday 8 weeks ago, or even whatever day I wanted to compare it to.
I don’t have games out any more, but if I did, the biggest stat I’d want to see is percentage of players logging in to IC when playing. I can get all the earnings stuff with regular earnings audits and my eyeballs. I serviced my games weekly whether they needed or not, so it was pretty easy to see weekly changes in earnings.
I’m really curious how much info Stern is pulling from the games and how useful it is to them. At a minimum, I suspect they can see the serial number and check the path the game took to get to it’s current location. Did this operator buy this game through a distributor, or did they buy it from Marco at a show? Tons of other data there like earnings and settings that could be useful.
I can obviously keep track of general trends but I’ve been trying to get more granular data for ages so I can approach management at a location with real & specific data for how much various events, and days of the week, hours open, etc. effect earnings. I can’t do that with just my gut and a count out every week or two.
I completely understand why you would want the info that detailed. I suspect it’s totally doable for Stern to make that info available. But I suspect most ops don’t need that granularity, so providing it is a low priority. I also wonder if memory space may be an issue. Gathering all the data is relatively easy, but all that data needs to be stored somewhere.
Seriously though, I was curious how much it might cost for Stern to store a few months worth of data, so I made up a whole bunch of intentionally high numbers:
I remember hearing a few years ago that Stern has a production capacity of about 100 machines a day. Let’s be generous and bump that to 150 machines per day for our purposes.
We can figure Spike 2 has been around for about 2200 days, so let’s again be generous and say that 330,000 Spike 2 machines have been produced.
Keeping up the generosity, let’s say all those machines are Stern Insider connected and are recording 100 games each day. That puts us at 33,000,000 games recorded per day. (For some reason I suspect reality would be slightly lower, but we move forward…)
Let’s assume Stern has assigned the backend work to an intern, and somehow every game recorded consumes a whopping 4K of disk. That puts us at 125GB of data being generated per day, or about 12TB if they were to store a sliding 3 month window of data.
Using one of the more expensive database options on AWS the storage cost on that works out to about $1200/mo, with cpu/io bumping the total instance cost to around $2k/mo.
Given all the above numbers are artificially inflated a great deal, I suspect in reality Stern wouldn’t feel the costs of hosting that data at all.
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