If you set the tilt tight that’s true regardless of warnings or not. The difference is that warnings let you know if you’re bumping too much on smaller moves. No warnings means you have no idea if a slap to the side on an orbit shot might end your ball for example…that sucks.
for this tournament there is 2 hours of practice time. Should only take a few games to get a sense for what the game lets you get away with. Pretty sure I’m not gonna mess with the tilt warnings, just a thought.
Not sure what you’re asking but on this GOT every time a ball is served into the shooter lane, you can safely short plunge to a live catch trap on the right. Pretty easy after a couple tries.
I really, really hate games set up with no warnings if they’re available in software. It feels super bad to unexpectedly tilt. I would much rather have the tilt on a hair trigger and a couple warnings than have no warnings, just from a psychological perspective.
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My usual answer to this problem (for instance I always recommend this for ToM) is to make the slings razor-sensitive. It doesn’t make the problem go away completely but it makes things a lot more difficult.
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Ah, I was thinking it’s one of the hold-up-the-flipper traps. Live traps are perfectly fine, but on most GoTs you can hold up and catch almost any ball coming from the left loop. I was wondering if that applied to your short plunge/pop feed, I have seen one that you can hold up to catch on the right.
Sorry if I’m not making sense, I am a bit tired and unable to word properly.
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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.