Tournament Setup: GoT Pro and ST Pro

No, that is kind of what I figured you meant. I guess does one really need a tilt warning on a game that is so safe off the plunge to get to a trap, and really doesn’t punsh you for any made shots?

Just trying to think of ways to make things harder for the vets that they can more than handle just will take some adjusting of play.

Depends. One way to push the difficulty up is to make the Blackwater locks harder. Making good players go for bank completion or a timed bank completion can push them from their comfort level. Also, tournament settings to erase playfield valid cheesing.

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Games that double the effort to regain multiball are fun and challenging! If a game’s locks are set harder I take it as a challenge and don’t mind that it’s not the default setting.

One of my favorite GoTs on location is a 5-ball with the extra hard locks - if you don’t complete the set in a set amount of time, the targets reset. Since you usually can hit the top one effortlessly, it adds that extra bit of pressure for the bottom one/makes hitting both a REALLY satisfying shot.

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Cool so it sounds like it skips to the third round of locks on normal settings. Also on my GOT you can get both targets with one shot if you hit right in between them so this setting might not be as hard as it normally would be. Which is good.

Yeah! Sounds like a good fix, especially for those who are used to hitting one target or the other. I know a lot of players I know tend to go for the top targets since they only need to glance into one.

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What about one warning? The debounce on Sterns usually allows a pretty good shove that’ll use two warnings but not tilt. One warning makes those strong moves suddenly more risky, but you can still nudge the game to a certain extent.

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I like it. I’ll have her over here Sunday if you want to tinker with us.

This is definitely under-appreciated. The combo of less steep, a fairly tight tilt, and sensitive slings can often be the most difficult and deadliest setups… particularly on pins that have fairly flat flippers (when raised).

The key ingredient to using a shallow pitch is a tight tilt, because it mitigates the opportunity for players to exploit the extra time they have to react to the ball with many big nudge saves per ball.

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Some games have to be steep. You leave POTC anywhere near 6.5 and it’s going to be a bottleneck. Jack it up and it’s fast, but still fun. I’d rather increase pitch to make a game harder rather than risk a too tight tilt. Players get mad if you make the tilt too tight. We’ve all seen it.

Yes, good players can sometimes take advantage of steeper pitch on some games, but the ball will always roll down to the flipper (or outlane) faster when you increase pitch. Agree on slings. Should always be touchy.

Tilt or pitch, it’s a fine line. Test, test, then test some more.

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This makes sense… for me, POTC’s biggest difficulty/obstacle is how the ball bumps off the top of the sling on all the feeds coming down from the right orbit. More steepness would make this more difficult to avoid, whereas a floaty game would be easier to bump the ball off the side wall and over the sling, to the flipper.

An example of the opposite - I’ve found F14 to be much easier when setup steep… keeps the ball moving vertically into the targets and away from the nasty outlanes.

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Some games actually get more fun the steeper you get. My BSD was a blast at 7 degrees or more. Ramp shots screamed back to the flippers. It had upgraded flipper coils (11629’s), but the lightning bats made sure no one took advantage of the increased pitch. I left it at 7 degrees on location and folks still loved it. Average game times were under 3 minutes.

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For now I have decided with these setups:

ST: one tilt warning, moderate sensitivity
Removed left post since rescue cannot be turned off. Set rescue settings to extra hard so it takes 3 target set completions to relight

GOT pro: one tilt warning, set lock targets to hard needing both hit before lock it lit.

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Made a couple more adjustments to ST. Disabled the rescue ball save. Desoldered the wire from the switch. Also removed the right outlane post. Left the rest as is. Pretty tough now.

Also reduced the ball save on ST and GOT to 3 secs. They seem tough but fair now. We will see once the tournament players have at them.

IMHO, setting tilt warnings to fewer than factory default is a bad idea. Plenty of other ways to make a game play more difficult.

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I went back and forth on it, and I would normally agree, but I couldn’t really think of any other ways to make these two harder.

At first I set both up with default warnings and very very tight tilts, but they played like that TWD Pro from LAX this year and I think that sucked. also that damn debounce allowed big moves, while little moves tilted out.

So I loosened the tilt a bit to allow for some decent nudging, but nothing crazy, then dropped down to one warning. this made the game times a lot shorter, but I didn’t feel like I was getting cheated ever by the tilt. The first way I had it did.

I am all ears on other ways to make these two more difficult though.

Do you have the fat part of the tilt bob on the top or the bottom?

bottom.

Stern’s debounce code makes tilts tough to set just right. In the past, you knew you could move the game a little, as long as you didn’t bang the ring three times. Now, you can move the game all you want, as long as you stop banging the ring within 2-3 seconds. Also think the hardware isn’t as good as it used to be. Buddy had a TSPP with a tilt that just didn’t seem to conduct electricity very well, even with new parts.

I think one warning on modern Stern debounce code is fine, with two warnings for WPC/Sys11.

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Yay. One player officially approves! Haha