BREAKING NEWS: New Difficulty Mode w/ Separate Leaderboards Coming!

[Gorgar]

So, will this difficult mode just be harder rom settings or will the physics be tuned to be more difficult as well? Because this is a major problem on Funhouse and Twilight Zone. Centaur too. That game kicked my ass IRL.

 

[Zaphod77]

Here are my guidelines for tournament settings.

1) Extra balls and specials set to disabled or points. points is preferred. no more infinity. Exception for brutal EM tables with hard to get extra balls. ball time will never be a concern.
2) install extra hard. if extra hard is not available, install hard. if those are not available, manual adjust features to be more difficult.
3) set number of tilt warnings to ZERO. this is the only way to make it fair to analog and digital nudgers.
4) have kickbacks not lit at the start of a ball. (if game is really too brutal, have it on)
5) disable ballsaver completely in all circumstances, unless there is no way to avoid the bumpers at the start. T2 in TPA doesn't need it. BSD absolutely requires that ballsaver to be remotely fair.
6) jack up the slope, and tweak the flippers to make sure the shots are still makable. this will take experimentation. on EMs, don't jack up the slope, because lo slope means more sideways motion which means outlanes. Most importantly, change the physics so that hold trapping is not reliable. if dead passing worked in real life for th etable it should work in TPA turnament mode too. SOme tables (Creature, for one) need serious physics mucking to make them tough.
7) if possible remove rubbers from inlane dividers, and move up or remove the outlane adjustable posts. set slingshots to go off on a hair trigger. this makes many hold traps unreliable.
8) if the game is still too easy, put lightning flippers on it, if possible.
9) enable tournament mode in the rules, if the game has it. Note that this will not help any for jack*bot. casino run is ALWAYS random, and that is fine.

I have special suggestions for certain problematic games, like Teed Off. To papatize it, 1) remove stoppers from wireform inlane feeds so balls go screaming down them too fast to trap, turn on reduced scoing, and set pitcy and putt to a flat value. disable nudge when a ball is in the plunger lane (done by checking x coords).

For certain tables that are already "hard" in tpa, like POTO and Diner, simply turning off the extra balls is enough.

 

[Zaphod77]

Mobile is a lot harder then pc or console, so it should get a separate leaderboard.

 

[JPelter]

Here are my guidelines for tournament settings.

1) Extra balls and specials set to disabled or points. points is preferred. no more infinity. Exception for brutal EM tables with hard to get extra balls. ball time will never be a concern.
2) install extra hard. if extra hard is not available, install hard. if those are not available, manual adjust features to be more difficult.
3) set number of tilt warnings to ZERO. this is the only way to make it fair to analog and digital nudgers.
4) have kickbacks not lit at the start of a ball. (if game is really too brutal, have it on)
5) disable ballsaver completely in all circumstances, unless there is no way to avoid the bumpers at the start. T2 in TPA doesn't need it. BSD absolutely requires that ballsaver to be remotely fair.
6) jack up the slope, and tweak the flippers to make sure the shots are still makable. this will take experimentation. on EMs, don't jack up the slope, because lo slope means more sideways motion which means outlanes. Most importantly, change the physics so that hold trapping is not reliable. if dead passing worked in real life for th etable it should work in TPA turnament mode too. SOme tables (Creature, for one) need serious physics mucking to make them tough.
7) if possible remove rubbers from inlane dividers, and move up or remove the outlane adjustable posts. set slingshots to go off on a hair trigger. this makes many hold traps unreliable.
8) if the game is still too easy, put lightning flippers on it, if possible.
9) enable tournament mode in the rules, if the game has it. Note that this will not help any for jack*bot. casino run is ALWAYS random, and that is fine.

I have special suggestions for certain problematic games, like Teed Off. To papatize it, 1) remove stoppers from wireform inlane feeds so balls go screaming down them too fast to trap, turn on reduced scoing, and set pitcy and putt to a flat value. disable nudge when a ball is in the plunger lane (done by checking x coords).

For certain tables that are already "hard" in tpa, like POTO and Diner, simply turning off the extra balls is enough.

Most of this looks good. I disagree about the tilt warning thing, since that's not how things work in actual pinball tournaments. Instead, I propose the tilt is made a Lot more sensitive in tournament mode. I'm also not sure disabling all ballsaves at all times really does anything besides make things a lot more random, again not something that is usually done in tournaments.

That said, looking good, but I kind of doubt they'll go to the trouble of changing the "physical" makeup of the tables. I'd guess they'll just toggle the tournament mode ROM switch, disable extra balls, and in the case of EM tables just manually disable extra balls. I'll be happy if I'm wrong about that though. Hell, I'll be happy anyway even if it's just no EBs and no random awards.

e: To comment further on the tilt thing, keeping tilt sensitivity the same and giving 0 warnings actually makes things even more unfair to digital nudgers, since they can't adjust the level of force at all.

 

[Jeff Strong]

Ok, so what exactly would this seperate mode do?

I emailed Bobby again to find out and this is his reply:

"They'll have different nudge strengths, physics, collisions, and ROM settings.

Physics/collisions settings I'm planning on:
More sensitive and stronger slingshots
Steeper table angle
More sensitive tilt
Less nudge
Wider outlanes"

In other words, exactly what we've been asking for!

 

[Pinballwiz45b]

I emailed Bobby again to find out and this is his reply:

"They'll have different nudge strengths, physics, collisions, and ROM settings.

Physics/collisions settings I'm planning on:
More sensitive and stronger slingshots
Steeper table angle
More sensitive tilt
Less nudge
Wider outlanes"

In other words, exactly what we've been asking for!

Perfect. I'll be able to make my other videos in no time!

 

[fenderbendr]

Sweet! Can't wait!

 

[smbhax]

Nice!

 

[Zaphod77]

Well two digital nudges in a shor tiem always warnings because digital nudges are max power.

If we make digital nudge weaker, and then based the tilt pendulum around the weaker digital nudge, then its' not so game breaking, but then analog gets a truly unfair advantage, by being able to slam harder (and eat a warning).

having zero warnings affects both, without taking away from the advantages of either. there are zero unintentional tilts in TPA, so zero warnings is appropriate, because the tolerance is learnable, while tight real life tilts will give warning. since tightening the tilt pendulum is totally unfair, the only fix is to remove the warnings, like old EM tables. this affects both nudge styles without taking away from their advantages.

 

[vikingerik]

I propose the tilt is made a Lot more sensitive in tournament mode.

How could this be implemented workably? There's no axis to make it more sensitive on. Think about digital nudging, as with a PC keyboard. Do you want one isolated nudge to trigger the tilt sensor? Then you really can't ever nudge at all, at most once or twice per ball with warnings. Do you want two quick nudges to trigger the sensor? That's what TPA already does. You could make that period longer, but that would make little difference to gameplay.

You can only really tweak tilt sensitivity if the game truly supports analog nudging on all platforms. This is doable even with a keyboard - Pro Pinball does, by making the nudge strength very sensitive to the duration the key is pressed. You get a warning on one nudge if and only if you hold it long enough (about 1/4 second) for maximum power. This approach is totally tweakable to any level of sensitivity, but would take a lot of reimplementing in TPA.

 

[Kaibun]

This sounds like a great idea if done right. But how the heck do you even play pinball without nudging? It's a basic gameplay element, you can't take that away. It's not really that abusable of a feature either.

BTW, I'm glad TAF Gold is getting its own leaderboards. I plan on buying it when it eventually becomes available to non-backers (for an reasonable price that is).

 

[Espy]

I wonder if this will be free or some kind of add-on.

 

[Heretic]

my guess is we will see our first double pack in some time , also double the price

 

[Kaibun]

Gold will probably cost as much as the regular table. A discount for owning TAF would be nice, but unlikely.

 

[Silverball67]

Agreed man, every platform should have its own leaderboards. You bring up a great point there.

Right, but this is a request expressed by many many friends in this community since the release on PS4 over and over again. But, nothing happened. Why???

 

[EldarOfSuburbia]

Even an option to filter the scores by platform would be fine.

 

[Silverball67]

Even an option to filter the scores by platform would be fine.

You hit the mark exactly. And this couldn´t cause too much effort from FS.
Take a look at Zen-Pinball-leaderboards.
So FS, let´s get it on.

 

[Tann]

An overall leaderboard is fine, but it would be good to have platform-specific boards, too. I'd like both. But make a leaderboard for every table for every platform and suddenly you're maintaining and monitoring 500 of them...

On the PS3/PS4 leaderboards, the platform is displayed ("Mobile", "PC", and "blank" for consoles). FS has just to add one new filter (Platform), relative to the played device, that would be "above" all the others.

It would give:

Filter #1: Overall - Subfilters: All Scores, My Score, Friends

Filter #2: Platform - Subfilters: All Scores, My Score, Friends

"Overall" includes all devices (PC, Mobile, consoles), Platform includes only the played device.

It wouldn't require a lot of work to include this (at least on consoles leaderboards), it has been requested a lot of times to Farsight, but nothing happened.

 

[fenderbendr]

When's the poll?

 

[Jeff Strong]

I wonder if this will be free or some kind of add-on.

From Bobby: "We not going to limit difficulty to only users with Pro mode."

Before getting too excited, is there any reason to think this will happen on PC, given that they haven't been able to implement a tournament on PC (even though it's coming "soon" per the in-game message, or was coming soon 1.4 years ago, anyway)?

From Bobby: "I'm planning on us adding the difficulty settings / leaderboards into the PC build at the same time we add PC tournaments."

When's the poll?

We're going to wait till Gord gets back from vacation in a couple weeks so he can be around to approve new registrations.