Request Suggestion for the Table Difficulty Issues

As most of us are aware by now, the tables are tuned before they reach us to reduce their difficulty. While on most tables this difficulty decrease has been moderate and not (imo) detrimental to gameplay, Scared Stiff and especially Twilight Zone are far, far easier than the corresponding physical machines. TZ in particular has been declawed to the point that it's a mere shadow of itself; it should be at least as difficult as the TPA version of RBION. I realize that video game pinball will always be easier than the real thing - the act of translating nudging from the physical realm to an analog stick or touch controls in itself makes things considerably easier - but I think we're starting to go too far.

I don't want a collection of easy tables. The occasional easy table is welcome - I quite enjoy a beer and a round of Theatre of Magic after a hard day at work and am thankful that the table's not after my blood. But I enjoy Medieval Madness in part because it kicks my arse eight ways from Sunday. I played RBION to death in pursuit of Atlantis - it took four months for me, and believe me, I was bouncing off the walls when I reached it. (And I became absolutely delirious with joy later that evening when I reached Lost in the Zone for the first time on a real TZ.)

I assume that FarSight is doing this in an effort to appeal to the casual players. I suppose I'm fine with that (and I further suppose it doesn't really matter if I'm not! ), but if this trend is going to continue, then I'd like to propose the following:

• Presumably the tables are tuned for two reasons: to hand-correct anomalous behavior in the physics engine with regard to particular ramps, bumpers, etc.; and to reduce the table difficulty.
• If those steps are done in order now or can be done in order - that is, if the physics are corrected first and then the table is tuned for difficulty - then I'd like to suggest that FarSight saves the table's collision mesh and other relevant physical properties after the first step for use in a "hard mode" version of the table. Then the difficulty tuning can take place and the "normal mode" table can be finished as normal.
• In the Table Menu for each table, a new option "Table Physics" is added, with "Normal" (default) and "Hard" as the choices. This option controls whether the tuned/difficulty-reduced or "raw"/full-strength collision mesh is used.
• In an ideal world, the "hard" tables would have separate leaderboards, be used for tournaments, etc. But since developer time is a scarce and precious resource, I'd be willing to forgo these extra features. (Although I can't imagine forcing a table into using the hard collision mesh for tournament purposes would be any harder than forcing it to turn extra balls off.)
• I think this would be a way of making the table difficulty appeal to both casual and fanatic players while imposing the minimum amount of extra work and minimum change to the existing development process for FarSight. New tables could have their "hard mode" developed at the same time as the rest of the table, while existing tables could have their "hard modes" added when their Pro Menus are developed. (TOTAN, SS and TZ would have to be revisited separately at some point.)

Don't get me wrong, I'm loving TZ even in its overly cuddly state. My coworkers will soon have the TZ music burned into their brains during lunch hour whether they like it or not! But having invested so much time in the real table, I think Twilight Zone deserves to have more of its unique challenge captured in TPA, and I think future tables deserve it as well.

I think something like this is definitely needed. It's cool to be able to see table modes and achieve goals that we might not otherwise be able to on the real machines, and that the game is more inviting to newer players, but I'd also really like an option for a higher difficulty. Not only so that the challenges are more realistic, but also so that the game times are similar to real life. These extended highscore sessions are giving me early arthritis.

Perhaps the nudging should be more realistic on "Hard" mode as well, if possible.

+1
A hard mode would be welcome. I enjoy TZ very much right now but added challenge would amazing.

I'd definitely like a setting for more realistic difficulty. I got 356 million on TotAN the other day and was happy at first but then realized that was in no way reflective of how I actually do on the real table!

Hm although this would be tricky to balance given that things like live catches and cradle separations don't really work on the PS3 version. If the flipper control isn't as good as the real thing then I guess they *have* to make other things a bit easier...and yeah I can't see there being a perfect way to balance that so the difficulty comes out equal between the two.

Jeff Strong said:

[...]but also so that the game times are similar to real life.

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I have to agree 100%. I'd love to be able to have a quick game of any of the DMD and System11 tables. The way it is now only the older tables allow for that. Although I think that that supposed hard mode should first of all change the ROM settings (e.g. EBs and specials awarding points).

+1 for harder modes with seperate leaderboards.

Bonzo said:

I have to agree 100%. I'd love to be able to have a quick game of any of the DMD and System11 tables. The way it is now only the older tables allow for that. Although I think that that supposed hard mode should first of all change the ROM settings (e.g. EBs and specials awarding points).

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The long game times are really a problem for something that should be pick-up-and-play-able. I find myself playing the older games for their shorter game lengths more than anything.

An "Arcade" mode would be great, with settings as you would find them on location (specials and replays earning credits or points). I don't mind legitimate playfield awarded extra balls, such as the one lit by clearing a certain number of castles in MM though. Tournament games are normally set to 4-balls, which compensates slightly for the lack of extra balls awarded.

Bonzo said:

Although I think that that supposed hard mode should first of all change the ROM settings (e.g. EBs and specials awarding points).

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Possible, but I'd like to keep the ROM settings and table physics separate for two reasons:

1. A player may want to play with the harder physics but on non-tournament settings (extra balls enabled and so forth), particularly on tougher tables like MM and RBION where you generally need an extra ball or two to see the wizard mode (or at least I do!).
2. It would be easier for FarSight if they were separate. If they're not, and the player has also gone in and changed the ROM settings on the actual table (like setting the difficulty to "extra hard", for example), then there's a lot of potential for conflicting settings. I'd like to keep this as easy as possible to implement and test, as we all know they are already pressed for time in Big Bear Lake.

Haha. Woah... I just responded in another thread about how awesome a hard mode with tweaked physics would be. I know the tables have always been easier than real life, but Scared Stiff and Twilight Zone are definitely a little extreme.

I understand that implementing such a thing is more work, so here is my proposal: make hard mode available as an option on the "Pro" versions of the tables. We get our hard mode, Farsight gets more money... it's fair and everybody is pleased.

Hinph said:

Haha. Woah... I just responded in another thread about how awesome a hard mode with tweaked physics would be. I know the tables have always been easier than real life, but Scared Stiff and Twilight Zone are definitely a little extreme.

I understand that implementing such a thing is more work, so here is my proposal: make hard mode available as an option on the "Pro" versions of the tables. We get our hard mode, Farsight gets more money... it's fair and everybody is pleased.

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I like that idea, gives me a more solid excuse for buying pro mode on tables.

Hinph said:

make hard mode available as an option on the "Pro" versions of the tables.

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Go to the Utilities Menu, install a Hard or Extra hard pre-Set

Or have you already tried that?

The Pro menu can definitely be used to tinker with settings to up the challenge, but it's the physics that need tweaking as well.

Give me a Scared Stiff machine with all of the easiest settings enabled in real life and I'll still rarely ever fill the Stiff-o-Meter up... but it frequently happens multiple times in a single game in TPA. It really does hurt the experience, as that would be a very big deal for me in real life!

Hinph said:

The Pro menu can definitely be used to tinker with settings to up the challenge, but it's the physics that need tweaking as well.

Give me a Scared Stiff machine with all of the easiest settings enabled in real life and I'll still rarely ever fill the Stiff-o-Meter up... but it frequently happens multiple times in a single game in TPA. It really does hurt the experience, as that would be a very big deal for me in real life!

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Out of curiosity do you play in landscape or portrait view?

Portrait... that's my favorite thing about playing on a tablet. Haha.

One way they seem to have compensated for this may be the Hall of Fame scoring challenge. On some of the tables I've been able to reach a high enough score to get 1000 HoF points. But I find Scared Stiff to be the hardest table so far to get a decent HoF score. You need 1,000,000,000 on SS to get 1000 HoF points. Maybe I just suck at that table, but it's my lowest scoring table in terms of HoF points by far.

If Lost in the Zone was supposed to be the Atlantis of this table then this table is tuned to easy, cuz i hit it whithin the hour of playing and didnt know the rules or what was going on, after the second time i hit it then i realized thats what it was. I remembered the mode from that guys tutorial in papa videos.

I think the difficulty is fine. I know I'm going against the grain here.

On iOS since I can't nudge really at all, my scores aren't very high, I actually welcome the nerfed difficulty. And I'm a pretty good "digital" player, but if you look at the leaderboards most people have very low scores on the platform.

Digital is never going to replace the real thing. I don't think people should be taking their scores so seriously. And this is coming from someone who is like top 20 WW on many of the Xbox tables.

netizen said:

Go to the Utilities Menu, install a Hard or Extra hard pre-Set

Or have you already tried that?

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All Extra Hard settings will do on TZ is unlight the piano and slot machine at the beginning of each ball, make reaching multiball slightly harder, and increase the number of Robots that have to be collected for the first extra ball. Against someone like me who can make left ramp - right ramp - piano 3-ways in his sleep (which will immediately spell GUM-BALL to light a lock, light both the slot machine and piano, and collect the lit piano...oh, and the combo scores 10M), it doesn't really do anything other than annoy me slightly.

It's the table's collision mesh that needs adjustment...and that bar in the bumpers needs to come out.

Advalle said:

If Lost in the Zone was supposed to be the Atlantis of this table then this table is tuned to easy, cuz i hit it whithin the hour of playing and didnt know the rules or what was going on, after the second time i hit it then i realized thats what it was. I remembered the mode from that guys tutorial in papa videos.

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If you're speaking of Bowen Kerin's tutorial video for Twilight Zone on the PAPA site, he never reaches Lost in the Zone in that game. I don't even think he gets close, maybe 8 or 9 door panels?

Lost in the Zone is comparable to Atlantis in that they're both the final wizard modes reached by playing all the other modes. But Lost in the Zone is definitely easier to reach on a real TZ than Atlantis is to reach on a real RBION. What makes TZ harder than RBION isn't the relative difficulty of the wizard modes, it's the relative difficulty of merely keeping the ball alive. RBION you can make a bunch of inaccurate shots and still keep the ball in play; on a real TZ the penalty for inaccurate shots is often instant draining.

To give you an idea of the difficulty of reaching Lost in the Zone on the real TZ, in over a thousand games I've made it there 3 times. Two of those times I was specifically aiming for it to the exclusion of points I might have scored elsewhere (regular multiball or Powerball Mania). I've only reached it once in playing a balanced game for score.

EDIT:

Mark Wyda said:

I think the difficulty is fine. I know I'm going against the grain here.

On iOS since I can't nudge really at all, my scores aren't very high, I actually welcome the nerfed difficulty. And I'm a pretty good "digital" player, but if you look at the leaderboards most people have very low scores on the platform.

Digital is never going to replace the real thing. I don't think people should be taking their scores so seriously. And this is coming from someone who is like top 20 WW on many of the Xbox tables.

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Which is why I'm suggesting to add the hard mode as an optional setting rather than replace the existing tables and cause a lot of uproar. But when I've just finished a four-hour game of TZ on the PC for 13.2 billion, I think an increase in difficulty is called for. (My longest game of TZ on the real machine is about 25 minutes.)

Another example, Theatre of Magic. I have an 8.5B high score. I know I can do better, but when it takes 2 hours just to get to the high score, I often A) don't have the time to do so, and B) can't work up the interest to do so. Hence why I think a hard mode would be ideal: if I want a marathon game, I can have that now, but if I only have 30 minutes to play on my lunch hour, that's hard to do unless I play something like Gorgar or Black Knight.

The difficulty level is fine for me too. But I realize it will be too easy for many very skilled players. It would be nice to have a more difficult option. I would use it for quick games here and there. But the top tier players might want to use it all the time. Sounds like a nice option to have.

On a personal note - thanks to FS for making it easier than the real deal. I actually got to experience LITZ and a billion point game. Something I would never see in real life. 300 mil is a good game for me in the arcade & I never sniff LITZ.

Sean DonCarlos said:

To give you an idea of the difficulty of reaching Lost in the Zone on the real TZ, in over a thousand games I've made it there 3 times. Two of those times I was specifically aiming for it to the exclusion of points I might have scored elsewhere (regular multiball or Powerball Mania). I've only reached it once in playing a balanced game for score.

on a real TZ the penalty for inaccurate shots is often instant draining.

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In real life, with the table set to it's hardest difficulty, 3 balls only with extra balls turned off, the outlane posts set as hard as they can be, WITH the rubbers removed, tight tilt settings, and maybe even some other difficulty mod I'm missing, "professional" players can still reach Lost in the Zone... Bowen talks in the tutorial about the player who did it, and said "even if I do get there, all the props go to ____ because he did it in the lights and stage of PAPA (tournament in front of people, pressure etc.)

On a table set up like that yea. But on a factory set board you can get away with quite a bit, which is welcoming for non expert players. Only the top 1% of even digital players can really keep the ball away from the outlanes, for everyone else they need the help.

At the end of the day I don't see astronomical scores on digital, and that suggests that the difficulty is right where it should be. On Xbox the scores are higher but that's IMO mostly due to the very lax tilt settings more than physics.

Sean DonCarlos said:

Which is why I'm suggesting to add the hard mode as an optional setting rather than replace the existing tables and cause a lot of uproar. But when I've just finished a four-hour game of TZ on the PC for 13.2 billion, I think an increase in difficulty is called for. (My longest game of TZ on the real machine is about 25 minutes.)

Another example, Theatre of Magic. I have an 8.5B high score. I know I can do better, but when it takes 2 hours just to get to the high score, I often A) don't have the time to do so, and B) can't work up the interest to do so. Hence why I think a hard mode would be ideal: if I want a marathon game, I can have that now, but if I only have 30 minutes to play on my lunch hour, that's hard to do unless I play something like Gorgar or Black Knight.

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I hear ya. As an option, sure why not.

I'm all for options. Being able to jack up the difficulty by messing with the factory settings, removing rubbers, turning off extra balls, moving the outlane posts would be pretty fun. But I don't know about messing with the physics and collision meshes. Cirqus Voiltaire on 360 is a great example of bad difficulty on a digital game. Outlanes are a complete dice roll with no way to save yourself. Might as well be set to extremely hard the way it handles drains. On a real CV you'd be able to nudge and the ball wouldn't behave the way it does.