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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Sean DonCarlos" data-source="post: 2992" data-attributes="member: 152">Thanks for the kind words, Ebortion...but those are very high level skills I only wish I had! My knowledge of what to do with a pinball often far exceeds my ability to consistently actually do those things on a real table! Still, hopefully someone here will profit from what advice I can offer.It's not a matter of how hard you nudge, it's a matter of when and in what direction. One of my very minor gripes with TPA and its predecessors is that the tilt is so liberal it encourages lots of random nudging. This often works, but it's not something you can transfer to a real table where the tilt is probably not so forgiving (and it doesn't make you feel skillful, either). On a real table, you're probably going to get one slight nudge, maybe two, before the warnings start. So what can you do with this one slight nudge?Suppose a ball is arcing in at a moderate speed from left field somewhere and it looks like it's heading for the right outlane. What you want to do is right before it gets there (and before it starts falling in), nudge the table once to the right. What you're doing when you nudge is essentially moving the table under the ball, so what's happening is you're still letting the ball drop...but you're actually moving the inlane for a brief moment so it's under the ball instead of the outlane, or at least far enough under that the ball strikes the left side of the post and rolls back to the inlane.Now suppose the ball is instead screaming in from left field to the right outlane. Now what will happen if you nudge right? The ball will have so much momentum rightward that it will still likely find the outlane and drain. So instead you nudge left and slightly upward when the ball is right above the outlane! Why? Basically you want to smack the right outlane wall into the ball in an attempt to get it to reverse direction, and if the ball is moving fast enough it will not have time to descend into the outlane before it does. The slightly upward part encourages the ball to bounce away from the outlane, and not hit the right side of the outlane post and go straight down.In either case, once the bottom third of the ball has crossed the level of the outlane entrance, it's probably too late to save it. (Still, try. Sometimes the laws of physics are violated and you get a lucky bounce out.)Of course, all this is modified somewhat by the shape of the outlanes in question, the amount of rubber in the area (more rubber = more bouncing = better chance of a save), how sensitive the tilt is, how many warnings you've taken, how important the end-of-ball bonus is, whether you can even see the outlane area (you'll understand when Cirqus Voltaire comes out), etc...in short, a bunch of table-specific things! And of course you don't have time to carefully consider the physics of the incoming ball in actual play. So practice will be essential, and you'll eventually develop intuition that will tell you what you need to do when as you get experienced with each of the tables. I'm much better at saving balls on ToM (assuming the Hocus Pocus magnets aren't saving them for me, of course!) than I am at Ripley's, simply because I've played a lot of real ToM and never touched a Ripley's before TPA. And of course there will always be house balls and weird ricochets that just can't be saved. That's pinball!</blockquote>

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