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Message: <blockquote data-quote="shutyertrap" data-source="post: 46115" data-attributes="member: 134">We’ll get back to my discussions with Bobby, but he wasn’t the only one I got to talk to all day.  At a certain point he had to leave for a bit, so I got handed off to Rob Mann. Some of you have probably had dealings with him online, as he is the User Community Manager.  What that means is, he has the thankless job of dealing with all of us monkeys online, reading our rants, enjoying our praise, and keeping a presence for FarSight in the fan community. I couldn’t believe he wasn’t a beaten down shell of a man!<img src="http://www.andreafriebus.com/files/2012/12/Rob2-copy.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="" /> Rob introduced me to the art department guys, headed by Jason Juneau. I figured since Rob is essentially the PR guy, and Jason is essentially responsible for the look of the tables, now’d be the time to get into issues some in the community have vocalized.First lemme say this though…I saw what the real tables look like that Jason and his team model off of. They earn their pay! For some reason, I had this idea that not only were the tables shopped for playability, but that they were restored to collectors quality shine. While Norman Stepansky would love it if that were the case, as he’s not just the audio guy but the fixer of machines, there’s simply no time and no reason for it. All restoration takes place digitally. The Twilight Zone you guys are currently enjoying is not the TZ I saw in the work room. Many tables are faded, have discolored plastics, oxidization on metal. Bride of Pinbot was really nothing to look at, but as Bobby pointed out to me, he’s never played one better than the one they got.<img src="http://www.andreafriebus.com/files/2012/12/TZ.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="" />Still, this is where some issues can pop up. The guys here at FarSight make no claim to being pinball historians. They model the tables off what they physically have, sometimes using the flyers as reference. So you know how some of you complained about the blue tinted ramps in No Good Gophers? Well, they’re transparent blue, right before my eyes. That rubber bumper in the lower pop bumpers of TZ, it’s on their table. And the guy they got it off of, it was there when he bought it. Turns out the table FarSight has is a prototype model. Jason said there has been numerous occasions where a table build was sent back due to a wrong colored light or something on the table that shouldn’t have been there.  There will be a future update that removes it from the game across all platforms.Jason elaborates, “If it wasn’t in the production table, we can’t put it in.” That means no working Tiger Saw in ToM, no gumballs in TZ, no lights in the skulls on Party Monsters. But yes, occasionally something might slip through, such as the painted Bony Beast of Scared Stiff. As a matter of fact, an upcoming table that Jason was working on right then had a little something he knew was not from the production run. I could be wrong, but I think they were modeling it anyways, just in case!<img src="http://www.andreafriebus.com/files/2012/12/Jason2-copy.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="" />Another thing Jason had to say was this, “The more people point stuff out to us, when we start getting a bunch of issues in one area, at least we know what people want more than anything else. So when we get a chance to do improvements or when devices get more powerful, that’s what we’ll do first.”See, Rob once a week puts out a list of what the top issues are among the forums, and sends it to all the guys. They’re listening to us. Maybe it’s time we listen to them though. A common complaint the guys hear, and it was mentioned multiple times, is that they should take a month off from building tables and just fix things with past tables.Jason took time to enlighten me on how it’s not as easy as we might think. Fixing the bugs, Jason gets on that soon after he hears about them. Mike Reitmeyer, who does final table builds before they get sent to Bobby for tuning, he just wrote a fix for balls passing through flippers. As much as they want to get those fixes out to us as soon as possible, there’re a lot of hurdles to be crossed.  Every time a change is made, it has to be submitted for approval once again to Stern or WMS, as well as each device it’s being put out for. If it is a licensed table like Monster Bash, it’d also have to be sent to Universal for approval.  Depending on the company, there are “marginal to extreme wait times” as Rob puts it. Until you get that approval, you can’t release the table.  So there is a lot of thought that has to go into when it is the right time to revisit a table.Take Scared Stiff on the PS3 for example.  It is finished and ready to go, as in Sony has it and it is in the approval process. But when it got delayed to come out after TZ and ST:TNG, many people said, “Great! Extra time for FarSight to really fine tune it”.  Well no, because that would involve resubmitting to WMS, the Elvira license holders, and then Sony again. That’s the simplified version. The business politics of all this are way beyond what most ever suspected.Throw on top of that the fact that when a table gets changed, it has to be re-downloaded again in its entirety. You gotta figure the majority of players are of the casual variety.  They don’t see a problem with the tables, so they don’t want to have to deal with a new download simply because a certain texture isn’t hi rez.  If you’re a mobile customer on a limited data plan, this becomes a true sticking point. Instead it’s a matter of stacking up the bug fixes until there is enough to justify needing the table to be downloaded again.There’s one more aspect to it all too. As Norman pointed out when I talked to him, this is a business that needs a revenue stream. Taking a month off of releasing a table means significantly less revenue, which a certain amount is counted on for paying the bills.  I ran with that, thinking not paying the bills means having to cut staff, which in turn would reduce the frequency with which tables could be released, which means even less revenue, ending with us not getting anymore pinball tables.Or there’s Norman’s simple way of putting it.  “Ask the average TPA player this…which would you rather have, table x which you’ve been dying to play, or nothing?” The message here is, be patient, as frustrating as that might be.<img src="http://www.andreafriebus.com/files/2012/12/Norman2-copy.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="" /></blockquote>

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