Where would you say you rank overall?

[Espy]

I was thinking about this last night. There is no way on TPA to show your overall ranking (at least on PS3...) so I was considering where I would be placed in all the TPA players worldwide.

After some thought, I think I would be in the top 100. My scores often lie in that area, as high as the top 20. The tables I'm less keen on maybe the top 200 or 300. There is also the fact that my score is often the best among my PS3 friends, particularly on the new tables (and I have most of you added... no offence ). There are some older tables I haven't touched in a while where my score is lower as I was still learning, but I rank pretty highly in the newest tables.

So what about you?

 

[Bowflex]

I would place exactly at number 11! Just kidding. My guess would be in the 65-80tg percentile of all tpa players.

 

[brakel]

I used to place in the mid 300lb range with my highest at about 365lbs but I've been working on losing weight for the last 5 years and recently weighed just under 300lbs at 293. I think that puts me in a different weight class. Wait...what are we talking about? o_0

 

[Fungi]

I'd say I'm about average. Around 6" maybe 6.5". Wait...what are we talking about? o_0

 

[Squid]

Uncle Sam told me that I was a Master Sergeant. That was a long time ago, I'm probably a General by now.
Wait, what are we talkin' about?

Seriously, I would just consider myself as some decent competition.

 

[invitro]

I am working on something that I think might answer this question. Except doesn't PS3 have its own leaderboard? ... I could tell you if you were in the leaderboard pool that the PC users are in.

Anyway... I think I am somewhere around #28 in the world .

 

[smbhax]

Except doesn't PS3 have its own leaderboard?

No. Only the 360 does.

~~~~~~~~~~

Regarding the original question, couldn't everyone just average their position on each table's leaderboard? I mean, except that it involves math. : P

 

[Espy]

No. Only the 360 does.

~~~~~~~~~~

Regarding the original question, couldn't everyone just average their position on each table's leaderboard? I mean, except that it involves math. : P

And a lot of boredom.

Nice to see you all took the thread so seriously

 

[neglectoid]

I suck at a lot of tables.

 

[Kolchak357]

I would guess I would be around 1,000 or so.

 

[vikingerik]

At the risk of sounding like a major egotist, I'm in the top ten. I have six or so legit #1 scores, a number of other top tens, and can reach top 20 on most tables I seriously try to.

At these levels, it's hard to identify any clear #1 player just based on scores, because many tables let you earn enough extra balls to play forever. I can go infinite on Funhouse, NGG, Bride, Whitewater, Pinbot, T2, and just about nearly so on Monster Bash and TZ. So can several other players, so the leaderboards are more a matter of who had the patience to play longest and didn't hit any game-killing bugs.

And my ranking isn't entirely from exploiting TPA's railroad physics: I also have several current and former #1 spots on the Pro Pinball leaderboards. I'm also at least decent at real pinball (have Ruled the Universe, LITZed, and reached most other wizard modes at least once) though not quite tournament worthy there.

 

[invitro]

Don't let Mr. erik's modesty fool you. He is the #1 TPA player and by an enormous margin. The gap between him and the #2 player is probably the gap between the #2 player and the #30 player. I wish he had some TPA videos somewhere. You don't, do you?

I have not heard the term "railroad physics" before... what does it mean?

 

[vikingerik]

I'm not #1. Tarek Oberdieck is better, probably so is Sir Moovenstein. Tarek just started recently and hasn't gotten to all the TPA tables yet. I have no idea how he puts up stuff like 19k on Central Park, 17M on Genie, 1.4M on Big Shot, 9M on Haunted House. I'm not anywhere near half those scores. Tarek has been beating me on the Pro Pinball leaderboards for years.

By railroad physics, I mean the areas where balls in TPA always take the exact same predictable routes. Things like on STTNG dropping the ball past the upper flipper to a guaranteed catch, TZ's perfectly predictable slot kickout, Black Hole's easy reentry shot back to the tunnel. Ruthlessly exploiting these over and over again is the way to the top scores on many tables.

I tried streaming TPA once, but couldn't get it running anywhere near smoothly enough to be playable. I could probably record some for offline viewing, but it wouldn't be nearly as interesting as you think - just multiple hours of sticking to safe shots and slap-saving any misses.

 

[Sean DonCarlos]

I'm probably around the 90th to 92nd percentile. At least that's where I tended to end up in the tournaments before they were split into tiers. And that's probably where I'm going to remain, too, as if I was going to invest a lot of time into improvement, I'd rather improve my real pinball skills (I'd consider myself an intermediate-level player of real machines).

 

[invitro]

Well I'll believe you when they have a better set of scores than yours .

Thanks for the railroad explanation... makes perfect sense.

I can understand the route to the top 10 scores on most tables, but some elude me. Like TOTAN. I can't conceive of even getting a billion on that table; I am ranked #2900 on it. Or 3M on Genie. Or 9M on HH. I have read lots and lots of strategy posts and have very large amount of real-world experience with most tables, and just think that the best way for me to learn how to get 1B on TOTAN is just to watch someone do it. I have gotten some ideas from Moovenstein's videos that I believe helped me improve a lot. I do not know of -any- videos of great TPA games other than Moovenstein's and this makes me very sad.

Thank you for your posts here... I mentioned the other day that I want to read all the posts of the best players and I suppose I will start with yours.

I -thought- that Tarek Oberdieck name sounded familiar. Or am I remembering it from PAPAs or Pinburghs? I was never any good at the Pro Pinball games but I sure played Timeshock and Fantastic Journey a lot.

I have still not gotten bored of 3-hour games yet... on the contrary, a 3-hour game of TZ is tremendously fun for me. I hope I never do.

 

[vikingerik]

TOTAN is a weird exception on high score strategy. You must exploit the glitch of stacking an endless Genie Battle with either Harem Multiball or 3x Lightning Lamp. That can score hundreds of millions at once, which nothing else on the table does. I haven't bothered to try. Don't bother worrying about scores on that one.

Tarek is German, so I doubt he shows up in Pittsburgh all that often.

I like 3 hour games too. It's the 12 hour ones that are a drag. TZ, NGG, Funhouse, Bride, T2 all take that long for my top scores.

 

[gooche77]

I think I'm #19 on Gamecenter at the moment.

 

[invitro]

vikingerik: Thanks for the response. I suppose I will try to exploit the TOTAN glitch just once. I have a few more questions for you.

In your 12-hour games, do you play all 12 hrs at once, or spread the game out over several days? I have had only a couple 3-hr games, and I lose focus after about 2.5 hrs (or have to go to work!)... I played one TZ 3-hr game straight, but usually go do something else after a couple of hours.

In TZ, how much of a bonus do you wait for before getting the Camera Collect Bonus award? Or do you wait at all? Do you shoot the Slot Machine for doors, or only the Piano? I know the word on the real TZ was to never shoot the Slot, but I could hit it pretty well on most machines... I worship that game and played it hundreds of times in the 1990s, capping out around 5B I think. I sometimes shoot the Slot on TPA but don't know if that is a good idea.

Finally... ToM is a game that is oddly difficult for me. There are lots of scores just barely over 10B that have to be the result of a glitch, but my rank is still only ~600. I played this game hundreds of times also in real life, but mainly because it was everywhere I went; I don't much care for it. The real-life machines I played all had the thing where left or right orbit shots always fell in the bonus X rollovers, so you easily got 8X on every ball, and 10-15B on every game, and I thought this was normal and so never developed a real strategy. Anyway, the questions: do you try to get bonus X? Do you play the modes or let them time out? Do you concentrate on getting multiball over and over (the right ramp seems many times easier on TPA than in real life) or the Grand Finale?

Ok 1 more question: what machines would you most like to see added to TPA?

Thank you for any feedback... I am endlessly curious about how the best players see pinball.

 

[vikingerik]

Mods, tell me if the topic drift is unwelcome and if this should go somewhere else.

My 12-hour games are most often two days, sometimes three. One trick: Whenever I leave the game for a while, especially overnight, I do it just as some multiball mode is starting. That lets me settle in on the next session with no risk of a quick drain before I'm focused in.

For TZ's Collect Bonus, my ball times are long enough that usually I have 5x bonus already anyway and something in the tank from Powerball Mania, so just take it. If not, I'll use some saved gumballs to play PB Mania a couple times, hoping for bonus multipliers, then take the bonus once it's at least 4x. Nothing else besides PB Mania is worth risking for bonus purposes, don't get distracted by Clock Millions/Chaos or anything else, they score peanuts.

Never ever shoot the slot machine on TPA. A brick kills you. L-R-piano is literally ten times safer to recover from a miss. My TZ scores went way up (from 10B to 50B) once I stopped shooting the slot machine. Funny, I think it's the other way around on the real machine, where L-R-piano are all significantly harder, so you need to mix in some slot machine hits to reach LITZ.

That all said, my biggest source of points on TZ is regular multiball. Get consistent on shooting L-R-piano for the jackpot then Spiral-Camera to relight it while the jackpot animation is still playing. I can often string together 5 consecutive jackpots this way and 10+ for the whole multiball, scoring almost a billion. I want to do a video showing this technique.

Theatre I haven't played in quite a while. I do remember most of the points coming from bonus X but there's little way to intentionally make that happen, just get long ball times and hope it falls in there eventually. Definitely ignore and time out the illusion modes, but you do want to start them since IIRC you get an EB each time to Grand Finale which makes that worthwhile.

There's another thread for TPA wishlist machines: http://digitalpinballfans.com/showthread.php/7274?p=132853#post132853

 

[Tabe]

I would guess I'm somewhere in the top 1000 or so, at least among console players. I'm terrible at some tables - TOTAN, RBION, and some others - but decent at a few like Funhouse and AFM. You'll never see me posting about marathon games or tables being too easy, that's for sure.