(An attempt at) The top 40 TPA players from leaderboard scores

[fromduc]

I add a couple of dta i got from my games or by my firends Benj:

Here's a rough rundown based on my memory, of what I've done and a decent guess at top ten. Only covers tables I've done so not most of seasons 3-4.

AFM: 4 hours for my 856M, 3 hours for top ten 589M

Big Shot: 1 hour for my 937K and top ten 1300K

Black Hole: 6-7 hours for my 191M, 4 hours for top ten 89M

Black Knight: 5-6 hours for my 125M, 10+ hours for top ten 229M

BSD: 1.5 hours for my 40B, 1 hour for top ten 24B

Bride: who the hell knows, at least 12 hours, everybody goes infinite here It took around 20-25 hours (!) to my friend Benj for his #7 34B

Cactus Canyon: 3 hours for my 2.2B, 1.5 hours for top ten 1.2B

Centaur: 5 hours for my 136M, 2-3 hours for top ten 48M

Central Park: 30 minutes for my 8500 and top ten 10500

Champion Pub: 3 hours for my 5.3B, 1 hour for top ten 1.8B

Cirqus Voltaire: 3-4 hours for my 1B and top ten 940M

Class of 1812: 2 hours for my 267M, 1.5 hours for top ten 162M

CFTBL: 6-8 hours for my 278B, 2-3 hours top ten for 92B

CBW: 1.5 hours for my 3.2B, don't really know about top ten at 7.2B (Around 5.5 hours for my #4 10B)

Dr Dude: 3-4 hours for my 680M, under 1 hour for top ten at 110M

El Dorado: 1.5 hours for my 8M, 1 hour for top ten at 4.5M

Elvira: 3-4 hours for my 801M, 2-3 hours for top ten at 528M

Firepower: 1.5 hours for my 7.7M and top ten at 5M

Flight 2000: 1 hour for my 14M and top ten at 11M

Funhouse: 6-8 hours for my 3B, 2-3 hours for top ten at 1B

Genie: 1 hour for my 4.5M, 1.5 hours for top ten at 6.6M

Goin Nuts: 2-3 hours for my 11M and top ten at 12M (very rough, I really don't remember playing this one)

Gorgar: 1 hour for my 3.3M, (rough guess) 3 hours for top ten at 10M

Harley: 2-3 hours for my 2.4B, 2 hours for top ten at 1.5B

Haunted House: 2 hours for my 6M and top ten at 4.5M

Medieval Madness: 6 hours for my 8B, 8-10 hours for top ten at 10B (somewhat unsure as I only played Castle Multiball and not sure if the BFTK route scores faster)

Monster Bash: 4 hours for my 41B, 2.5 hours for top ten at 12B (this table scores progressively with Monsters of Rock values)

NGG: 6-8 hours for my 41B, 4 hours for top ten at 6.5B (also progressive scoring)

Pinbot: 3 hours for my 98M, 1.5 hours for top ten at 43M

Ripley's: 4-6 hours for my 24B, top ten is way bugged out with all the 20B glitch scores

Scared Stiff: 3-4 hours for my 2.3B, must be over 12 hours for top ten at 8B, but how you go that long without a game-killing lost ball I don't know

Space Shuttle: 3-4 hours for my 72M, 1.5 or so for top ten at 20M

STTNG: 4-5 hours for my score (says 950M but was actually 1950M) and top ten at 586M

TOTAN: screw this crap

Taxi: 3 hours for my 126M, 1.5 hours for top ten at 65M

Teed Off: really don't remember this one, times vary wildly based on whether you hit some of the multi-billion modes and the doubling

Terminator 2: 4-5 hours for my 20B, 2 hours for top ten at 6B, but you could go faster if you are accurate at never missing when grinding chase loops (On this one with non-Martian skills for the loops, it took me 7h to make my #5 12.3B... i'm sure i lost much time in chasing my EBs too to stay max in EBs)

Theatre: 3 hours for my 47B and top ten at 28B

Twilight Zone: 12 hours for my 127B, 5-6 hours for top ten at 56B

Victory: 2-3 hours for my 389M and top ten at 293M

Whirlwind: 2-3 hours for my 380M and top ten at 220M

Whitewater: 8-10 hours for my 69B, 3 hours for top ten at 18B

About season 3 tables:

Fish tales: around 2 hours before making math to not join 10B

Who Dunnit: 7 hours for my #3 323B

LCA: hard to remember but around 5-6 hours for my #1 201M

High Speed: 6-7 hours for my #5 99M but it was on my 3rd game on the table so i guess i lost much time in chasing EBs.

 

[Benj341276]

I add a couple of dta i got from my games or by my firends Benj:




About season 3 tables:

Fish tales: around 2 hours before making math to not join 10B

Who Dunnit: 7 hours for my #3 323B

LCA: hard to remember but around 5-6 hours for my #1 201M

High Speed: 6-7 hours for my #5 99M but it was on my 3rd game on the table so i guess i lost much time in chasing EBs.

For following what my friend Fromduc said:

MM: beetween 7H and 10H for 10B-Top 9

MB: beetween 4 and 6H for 13B- top 9

POTO: near 45 Minutes for 57 M- top 8

TED OFF: beetween 1H and 2H for 16M (with double before 10M- near 6M )- top 4

T2: beetween 5H and 6H for 8B-top 7 (lose time to have all time 4 extra balls plus my ball in game)-Spécial dédicace to Fromduc who gived me the strategy for this table a few weeks ago

CC: Near 2H for 1,6B-Top 6

CBW: Near 5H for 10B-Top 3

I just make some plays on Adams family,starship troopers, party zone and earthshaker, cause this 4 tables just go out on PS4 EU. I think party zone and starship top 10 can be make near 1H of play but i feeled in my first impression that this 2 tables are clever for make drain the ball and difficult to take control of ball....

 

[fromduc]

Have u guys noticed the new leaderboard systeme on the farsight site? U Can have now leaderboards on each plateforms if u want, plus a special feature if u're connected on the site.

Edit: be carefull, now the default leaderboard is the weekly one ^^

 

[Flipperdeflip]

My weekly scores on the TPA site are higher than my monthly scores?!?

 

[EldarOfSuburbia]

My weekly scores on the TPA site are higher than my monthly scores?!?

Weekly runs from Monday thru Sunday.
Monthly starts on the first of the month.

There was an overlap this week so the monthly boards reset in the middle of the week.

 

[invitro]

Have u guys noticed the new leaderboard systeme on the farsight site? U Can have now leaderboards on each plateforms if u want, plus a special feature if u're connected on the site.

CELEBRATE GOOD TIMES COME ON!

So much data, so little time. It looks like they deleted a lot of "iffy" scores. Even RBioN has the 10B/20B glitch scores removed. TAFG has a leaderboard. What does "Filter Scores" do?

 

[EldarOfSuburbia]

I've no idea what "Filter Scores" does.

Also, still some "suspect" scores in there. Though sometimes I think that the rule "if Tarek has beaten it, it stays" is fair enough sometimes....

Plus maybe some bugs.

But it's a BIG improvement.

Who says FS never did anything for us?!

[Edit] Ahh, that's what's annoying, when I click on "Personalized" scores it gives you "neighborhood" scores for your top score, but listed as #1-#10. It would be better if these were listed with their actual rank.

 

[JPelter]

I've no idea what "Filter Scores" does.

Also, still some "suspect" scores in there. Though sometimes I think that the rule "if Tarek has beaten it, it stays" is fair enough sometimes....

Plus maybe some bugs.

But it's a BIG improvement.

Who says FS never did anything for us?!

[Edit] Ahh, that's what's annoying, when I click on "Personalized" scores it gives you "neighborhood" scores for your top score, but listed as #1-#10. It would be better if these were listed with their actual rank.

A lot of the TAF top 10 scores are totally bogus for sure, but who gives a hoot I guess. Can't really start pointing fingers unless it's absolutely blatant, and if people feel the need to cheat in games that are essentially just about having fun, it's their own shame.

 

[Tann]

I would like to know this too! Data like how many hours it takes to get a top 500, top 100, top 20, #1 score, per table.

It would be great if Farsight reported this, but I wouldn't be surprised if game time wasn't stored.

I feel ashamed for FS when I see that a weak free-to-play like Pinballistik (on PS3 too) has an awesome leaderboard system: for each highscore, there is the number of balls played (including extra-balls), the duration of the game, and the PPS average (points per second).

That's just perfect.

An there are multiple leaderboards for time attack highscores. If I remembered well: unlimited time, 5mn, 20mn, 1h. Something like that.

And there's also leaderboards based on several target scores (for example, how much time you need to score 1M, 10M, 100M, etc. One leaderboard for each, with also the PPS stat).

Knowing this, shame on you, Farsight, with your rotten leaderboard system!

A lot of this will cease to be a problem if we get a well made tournament mode and leaderboard system.

Indeed.

 

[EldarOfSuburbia]

Remember that most of the tables in TPA are emulated from original ROMs. That means that for things like goals and scores, TPA has to somehow "scrape" that information from certain visual and audio cues - they can't embed their own hooks into those ROMs. Unlike a built-from-the-ground-up fantasy pinball app where presumably the developer has all of the code at their disposal.

This reason alone explains why there are problems triggering certain goals - depending on what the table visuals or audio is, the cue might not be picked up by whatever is listening.

The same goes for scores. TPA scrapes the final score of a game the same way.

How do they do that? There's going to be some kind of polling thread that runs every CPU cycle (60hz, in TPA's case) that watches for events that it needs to react to. The more you put into that thread for a table to look for, the worse your performance gets. Maybe not so much on a PC or console but on tablets and 'phones the cost might be too great.

So can they get more advanced stats together? Yes. But at a cost. And they won't be accurate, because of the inherent limitations baked into how they get that information.

This is not "shame on Farsight", it's a case of knowing or being able to extrapolate how the application is programmed and seeing that what you want done isn't necessarily as easy or feasible as you might think.

 

[Tann]

This is not "shame on Farsight", it's a case of knowing or being able to extrapolate how the application is programmed and seeing that what you want done isn't necessarily as easy or feasible as you might think.

I can understand this (especially concerning the number of balls), but come on, add a simple clock in order to know how much time has been needed to put an highscore wouldn't be a huge thing to implement (and add the value to leaderboards). No need to mess with the Roms.

They did it for tournaments (in the reverse way), so...

Whatever, maybe it's planned, as FlippyFloppy has this in the list of "possible" new features (here):

Statistics Menu: Time played
Number of times played
Average score
Ect

 

[Gus]

A lot of the TAF top 10 scores are totally bogus for sure, but who gives a hoot I guess. Can't really start pointing fingers unless it's absolutely blatant, and if people feel the need to cheat in games that are essentially just about having fun, it's their own shame.

Why do you think that? The table is easy enough and most of the top scorers are well known pinball wizards (Miwurdz, Tarek and you). I'm sure TAF attracted a lot of players who put a lot of time into it.

 

[invitro]

Why do you think that? The table is easy enough and most of the top scorers are well known pinball wizards (Miwurdz, Tarek and you). I'm sure TAF attracted a lot of players who put a lot of time into it.

Of the top 10 scorers on TAF, I would call 7 well-known pinball wizards: Mark_Miwurdz, Tarek, Space T., Gus, Toolinit, mattenno, and AntonR. At least, they are all in my Top 100 so I would want to know what's bogus about them . Of the other 3, Failsight is a known hacker, Syntax Terror has only a #579 BSD score, and the unicode username has no other ranked scores.

 

[JPelter]

Why do you think that? The table is easy enough and most of the top scorers are well known pinball wizards (Miwurdz, Tarek and you). I'm sure TAF attracted a lot of players who put a lot of time into it.

Failsight is somewhere in there, as well as "Go **** yourself" (in a weird font), and syntax terror (who also has the #1 on gold) is pretty dubious. None of those are 100% fake but very likely. Like I said though it's not like it really matters. In fact failsight was in top 10 twice till a while ago, but I guess FS nuked one of those scores.

 

[Mark Miwurdz]

Why do you think that? The table is easy enough and most of the top scorers are well known pinball wizards (Miwurdz, Tarek and you). I'm sure TAF attracted a lot of players who put a lot of time into it.

I'd be happy to stream the table on twitch to show any doubters. I only have to be asked.

 

[JPelter]

I'd be happy to stream the table on twitch to show any doubters. I only have to be asked.

I wasn't talking about your score. None of the scores on the table are dubious because of the score. They're dubious because of when they were posted and by who.

 

[Mark Miwurdz]

I don't follow.

 

[JPelter]

I don't follow.

Never mind. TAF scoring is completely broken at the moment anyway in a couple of different ways. It was a bad example.

 

[Mark Miwurdz]

Never mind. TAF scoring is completely broken at the moment anyway in a couple of different ways. It was a bad example.

Fair enough. How is it broken?

 

[JPelter]

Fair enough. How is it broken?

This isn't really the thread for this discussion, but the primary problem is that the ROM glitches out after a while and starts dumping way too many points at you, and the secondary one is that the Farsight overflow system doesn't award 10 billion rollovers all the time (which affects several other tables as well).

The problem with these two combined is that firstly it's extremely trivial to get to almost any arbitrary score in the table fairly fast, but only if you metagame the score by making sure you only use small increments to transition ten billions. This is more or less the same problem as Creature, except in creature the high jackpot scores are intentional. In TAF they're due to the ROM glitch.