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Questions Answered (sort of)

BlahCade Pinball Podcast·podcast_episode·1h 18m·analyzed·Aug 31, 2016
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Analysis

claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.033

TL;DR

Blockade hosts critique Farsight's buggy H2H beta and parse vague Q&A responses about future pinball arcade content.

Summary

Chris Frebus and Jared Morgan discuss the Blockade Podcast's tech issues, beta testing of Farsight's head-to-head multiplayer feature (which is largely non-functional), Farsight's Q&A session with community manager Mike Lindsay about future releases, and detailed critiques of Pinball Arcade's implementation of specific tables like Junkyard. The hosts examine tournament tier systems and speculate on Farsight's long-term strategy for content releases.

Key Claims

  • Farsight's head-to-head multiplayer beta is only functional approximately 5% of the time

    high confidence · Sven and Chris describe repeated crashes, null reference errors, and inability to successfully start matches; Chris: 'the saddest of betas to try and participate in because between the fact that it doesn't function very well at all, like maybe 5% of the time'

  • Stern Pinball Arcade VR app is exclusive to Oculus/Samsung Gear VR and not coming to other VR headsets in the near future

    high confidence · Mike Lindsay response via Farsight Q&A: 'The Stern Pimble Arcade app is exclusive to the Oculus VR. It's not coming to any of the other VR headsets anytime in the near future'

  • Farsight previously made the same 'as long as there is demand' commitment about future seasons before Season 6

    high confidence · Jared notes: 'It's a reply they gave before Season 6, I think, already. It's exactly the same reply'

  • Microsoft eliminated its QA department and shifted to community beta testing, causing the recent Windows update catastrophe

    medium confidence · Chris discussing his PC issues: 'Microsoft got rid of their QA department... they have this, it's kind of what Farsight is doing, where it's, hey, want to be a beta tester?'

  • Junkyard in Pinball Arcade has poor ball physics including non-animated spinner micro-switch and artificial-looking crane trajectory

    high confidence · Chris details: 'the micro switch leaf doesn't move at all... the serpentine way the crane behaves... it will go up and sort of curve up into a U... it just looks really really artificial'

  • Farsight has not implemented proper stage ball mechanics in Junkyard's trough, making the game feel slow

    high confidence · Jared: 'I don't feel that FastFight have implemented the... stage ball in the trough... Without that feature implemented, it makes the game so slow'

  • Console versions of Pinball Arcade lag 5+ months behind other platforms due to certification process costs

    medium confidence · Jared: 'If you wait five months for a table to come out... probably bought it in another format' and Chris notes certification is 'incredibly expensive'

Notable Quotes

  • “the saddest of betas to try and participate in because between the fact that it doesn't function very well at all, like maybe 5% of the time, and then the fact that because it doesn't function, you're less likely to try and be in it”

    Jared Morgan @ ~35:00 — Captures the severity and impact of the head-to-head beta's technical failures on user engagement

  • “Translation, they don't know when it's going to happen, or if it's going to happen, just they would like it to happen”

    Jared Morgan @ ~55:00 — Interprets Farsight's non-committal corporate speak about future features; illustrates frustration with vague responses

  • “My stellar game is what the elite player's average game is. That's right. It's a throwaway game, basically.”

    Chris Frebus / Sven @ ~22:00 — Articulates the competitive imbalance in virtual tournaments between casual and elite players

  • “I can't unsee it now, and blame me, everyone, because I'm about to tell you as well... when that thing spins, the micro switch leaf doesn't move at all”

    Chris Frebus @ ~75:00 — Demonstrates how flawed animation details can permanently damage enjoyment of a virtual recreation

  • “It's not entirely obvious that they would continue because there is a certain tipping point where the money generated from all the previous seasons is more than enough to sustain the studio without having to bother with recreating tables”

    Jared Morgan @ ~63:00 — Reveals unpublicized business considerations about Farsight's content strategy that differ from official messaging

  • “every table is a gateway drug... So every table is a gateway drug”

    Jared Morgan @ ~66:00 — Explains Farsight's economic model: niche players drive licensing value and future content monetization

  • “I think the real problem that Farsight faces is that they just keep on ticking off the console owners... if you really want to play that, you probably bought it in another format”

    Jared Morgan — Identifies self-sabotaging business strategy: console delays push customers to competitors

Entities

Chris FrebuspersonJared MorganpersonSven (Kazania)personFarsight StudioscompanyMike LindsaypersonFredopersonHereticpersonJeffpersonPinball Arcadeproduct

Signals

  • ?

    business_signal: Farsight may reach unsustainable economics where revenue from existing seasons exceeds new content costs, making continued development financially questionable

    medium · Jared references private conversation: 'there is a certain tipping point where the money generated from all the previous seasons is more than enough to sustain the studio without having to bother with recreating tables'

  • ?

    business_signal: Farsight's console release strategy creates 5+ month delays vs. other platforms, pushing players to purchase tables on competing platforms or abandon the product entirely

    medium · Jared: 'If you wait five months for a table to come out, odds are... you probably bought it in another format'; certification process cited as cost barrier; Chris notes this is 'incredibly expensive'

  • ?

    community_signal: Blockade Podcast successfully attracted international live audience participation (Sven from Germany at midnight local time) via tweeted web link for Hangouts On Air

    high · Chris notes: 'I went ahead and tweeted out the web link for people to show up and somebody showed up! Hey, look at that. It's Sven'; demonstrates growing global pinball community coordination

  • ?

    community_signal: Former Farsight employee 'Fredo' was terminated after bizarre forum Q&A responses resembling community member Heretic's posting style; triggered speculation about employee legitimacy

    high · Hosts confirm employee was real but no longer employed; Heretic was reportedly offended by the imitation; responses appeared deliberately satirical or incoherent

  • ?

Transcript

groq_whisper · $0.236

0:00
This is the Blockade Podcast with your hosts, Chris and Jared. You are listening to the Blockade Podcast. I am your host, Shut Your Trap, aka Chris Frebus. Joining me as always, my co-host, Jared Morgan. G'day Chris, how's things today?
0:41
Things are going swimmingly well, final days of August. Even though my kids started school three weeks ago, I can finally feel like the school year is starting. Oh right.
0:54
It's been a full month for me because of course my birthday month draws to an end this weekend. so all the catching up with people and all that sort of stuff that goes along with birthdays is sort of slowly wrapping up so and next weekend is Father's Day so oh that's right you guys have the weird Father's Day Southern Hemisphere Father's Day that's right we do so yes I'm looking forward to being lavished with pancakes or something like that in the morning and then going off to do something with the family, I think. Probably go to a park or something like that and have some fish and chips on the beach as we do here. See, it's funny when my wife, for Mother's Day, her request is, you all need to leave the house.
1:43
Well, I did actually. It's funny, you know. I did suggest that at one point. And Kim said, well, hang on, this is all about family. And it's a family sort of thing about recognizing you. And I said, well, yeah, that's true. But as you said, It's not so – a lot of fathers do the same thing. They're like, right, see you later. It's my day. I'm going down to a theme park and riding roller coasters all day, for example. Right.
2:06
@ ~85:00
Stern Pinball Arcade VRproduct
Junkyardgame
Blockade Podcastorganization
Zen Pinball / Zen Studioscompany
Rock Bandproduct
Guitar Heroproduct
Invitroperson
PinballWizperson
Tarekperson
Gusperson
Eldarperson

competitive_signal: Proposed tournament tier system change: elite/gold tier players should have limited attempts (e.g., 2 tries) vs. casual players (unlimited) to improve balance and reduce demoralization of average players

medium · Sven and hosts discuss how elite players' consistency over 30+ attempts makes casual players mathematically unable to compete; limiting attempts increases chance variance and fairness

  • ?

    design_philosophy: Junkyard virtual recreation has significant animation quality issues (non-moving spinner micro-switch, artificial serpentine crane trajectory, unimplemented ball staging mechanic) that degrade gameplay feel and immersion

    high · Chris detailed visual glitches; Jared noted slow ball staging and repetitive progression; both attribute reduced enjoyment to technical implementation despite table appeal in real life

  • ?

    licensing_signal: Stern Pinball VR app exclusivity to Oculus/Samsung Gear VR (not even PC Oculus) represents extremely narrow market penetration; VR platform choice appears to limit accessibility

    high · Mike Lindsay: 'exclusive to the Oculus VR... not coming to any of the other VR headsets anytime in the near future'; Jared: 'that's a very narrow market'

  • $

    market_signal: Farsight's Q&A responses use consistent corporate non-committal language ('we plan on,' 'we would like to,' 'looking into the future') that obscures actual timelines or priorities

    high · Jared translation: 'they don't know when it's going to happen, or if it's going to happen, just they would like it to happen'; note that identical language was used before Season 6

  • ?

    product_concern: Farsight head-to-head multiplayer beta is functionally broken with ~95% failure rate (crashes, null errors, hard lockups on X button, match search returning zero players despite users in lobby)

    high · Sven and Chris describe multiple independent test attempts; Jared: 'maybe 5% of the time' functional; match search showing 'zero players in the queue' despite both players in lobby with search active

  • ?

    product_strategy: Pinball Arcade difficulty mode feature has been stalled since at least 3-4 years ago due to emulation complications and is 'severely deprioritized' despite fan requests

    medium · Jeff brought this up in first Farsight visit ~4 years ago; Mike Lindsay response: 'ran into complications with the emulation' but 'hasn't been dropped'; Jared interprets as deprioritized

    • Which I have done before. I think it's kind of a cool idea. But here in this house, it's all about celebrating together, and I think that's nice to be able to do that because I'm at work all week and the kids don't really get to see me anyhow, so it's good to sort of do something together. Yeah, so you'll notice that my audio is noticeably better again today. I'm back using my PC.
    2:31
    I say my PC in that it is the same box and container, but unfortunately all my programs are trapped on the RAID drives that I have no access to. So I have a very stripped down version of my PC,
    2:46
    and I even noticed that things pop up that you're kind of like, oh, where the heck is that? And sure enough, the one that popped up for me was the fact that I don't know where my camera adjustment is for here on Google Hangouts On Air.
    3:02
    So, yeah, you know, slowly but surely things will come. Hopefully that patch will come through in 30 days because… I think if it's that bad, they'll be releasing it as a hot fix pretty quickly. I don't know. Apparently they just bricked anybody that had an Asus computer also. Oh, right, so it's ISIS running array to array. No, no, not running array to array. No, there's a whole new thing.
    3:29
    So what I found out was that apparently Microsoft got rid of their QA department. Oh, Christ. And instead they have this, it's kind of what Farsight is doing, where it's, hey, want to be a beta tester? And so you can load in the newest build that has not been released necessarily to the general public so that you can test it. However, the warning that Microsoft has given to these people is don't test it on your actual machine. Use a virtual machine, I believe is how they're saying. Well, of course, the problem with that is then it's not dealing with – it works perfectly well in that virtual machine, but it's not working with real-world machines. and so then they release it live and all of a sudden they get all the live reports back and everybody's going, hey! It's cold. It doesn't work. So, yeah, I don't know why Microsoft is operating on the cheap. Yeah.
    4:31
    There you go. This is the new reality of their operating system. Yeah. Oh, hey, you know what, Jared? What's that? Since we've been trying, we're trying out to make Hangouts on Air more inclusive, as you will, I went ahead and tweeted out the web link for people to show up and somebody showed up! Hey, look at that. It's Sven, also known as Kazania on the forum.
    5:01
    Hello from Germany. Hello, Sven. So here we go again. We're being international on the full global scape. All time zones being represented. Yeah, old time zones. I was just about to say it. It's midnight over here.
    5:21
    So we wanted to... Sven wanted to kind of talk about the new tournament that's going on with Farsight.
    5:30
    The eight tables playing in ten minutes. Oh, excuse me. Sven didn't want to talk about that. He wanted to talk about the head-to-head tournament. Yeah, that's right. That's what we all really care about. We don't care about the monthly tournament, come on. What have your experiences been this past week with it? Yeah, I was trying with Dave950im or LAM. He was chatting me up and saying, hey, do you want to test the beta head to head? I was trying earlier going in and basically saw no one playing it. I said, yeah, why not? And so we met. I installed the beta and we met there.
    6:17
    And then, yeah, we had one game of high speed in the beginning that was working, which was quite nice. surprising for me how much fun it is actually to see how the other one is doing. And then... And then we tried again and nothing happened.
    6:42
    Congratulations! Welcome to the beta and what we've all been experiencing. I think one game I think we were trying to start and even the countdown launched and then it crashed. Yep. On another occasion, we didn't select any table. We said, well, just choose search for match for high score. And then what happened, we got some nice message, white letters, blue letters in front of all the icons. So you hardly could read anything. but it was basically telling us, well, you should have table brackets null.
    7:30
    If you want to play it, you have to buy this table at the price of brackets null. Oh, right. So a bad purchase message or something like that. Yeah, I don't know. And funny enough, we both got the message.
    7:49
    And when we were trying to back out of it, the X crashed. Oh, dear. It was a hard crash. I had, well, I guess you could say I had a similar experience. The person I was playing with had a similar experience. So I invited a friend of mine to come hop in and try the beta out. he only owns the first three seasons. So I thought, oh, this is interesting because I haven't yet played with somebody that didn't have all the tables. So I was very curious to see how it would handle that. And it handled it absolutely beautifully because it flipped the coin and decided that he was going to be the host. However, he had not selected a table because as a newbie to the beta he was utterly confused like the rest of us always have been. And he didn't realize that you had to select a table. So the table or the game did a random table selection for him and, of course, picked one that he has not purchased yet. That's very strange.
    8:53
    Which it allowed me to start the game, but, of course, to him it gave what you saw, which is all the blue lettering saying, would you like to purchase this table? And it completely locked up on him and he had to hard exit out of the game. The funny thing is both Dave and I have all seasons, all tables, so I don't know why we got this message.
    9:18
    I'm really annoyed with the 50-50 coin flip just for that specific reason. If somebody has not selected a table, then don't let them be the host of a table. Let the person that actually has selected a table then choose. or better yet, what I always keep on saying, how about matching the people first and then giving them an option window of, hey, what table do you want to play? And then you guys select the table. Basically like a little sort of chat window that opens up or something like that so people can actually have a dialogue. Hey, what do you want to play? I keep on going back to it, just look at what Rock Band or Guitar Hero did because it first matched you and then it said you could pick a table and it would show in the other person's, or pick a song, and it would show me in the other person's window, oh, hey, this is what this person has picked, and you'd set a playlist, and then you'd hit play. And if you didn't like the playlist, then there was no chat or voice if you didn't have a headset connected. So we all learned a shorthand real quick of how to back out or do some kind of a jiggle or whatever to basically say, I'm not doing that one. Okay. Okay, okay.
    10:29
    So, but guys, like, just look at that, how it plays. But Chris, this is fine-tuning. I would be quite happy if the basic functionality, like getting two players who are in the lobby together to play a game. We tried it earlier today, and we were both in the lobby, both selecting the same game mode and selecting search for matches. And we both saw zero players in the queue. Yeah.
    11:08
    So at the moment it's just not usable. And then, of course, we come to a lot of things, features, which would be nice to have, like seeing which ball the other player is currently playing. If a player is finished, and if you are finished first to get the final score submitted to your screen, because what you're getting right now is the score as you finish the game. So when I finish my game...
    11:44
    No, no, yeah, you won. And the other player is still playing. Yeah. That's what happened with David Lee. I thought, well, great, I won the game. And then later we chatted and he said, well, I get, I don't know, 700,000. And I said, oh, well, I get only 500,000. But when I stopped, it said it would have only 400,000.
    12:10
    It's really the saddest of betas to try and participate in because between the fact that it doesn't function very well at all, like maybe 5% of the time, and then the fact that because it doesn't function, you're less likely to try and be in it. I've never been in the beta and had somebody just already randomly be in there. And at the most, it's always been only one other person in the beta with me. I've never had a group to see how it handles that. I think if you look up in Steam charts, you see there are usually about, on average, 80 players simultaneously on average in the game, with a peak of 170 or so, I think, last month. and yeah it's just not that big of a player base to begin with like you have in other games like Overwatch or whatever you have all those mainstream titles where everyone is crazy about to get into the data but that's not what we have here and that's what worrying me most about the game itself or the mode itself, would it be more in the future than just me seeing you, Chris, online and saying, hey Chris, how about a head-to-head and not going into the game and just sitting in the lobby and waiting for a game? I don't see that happening, to be honest. Yeah.
    14:01
    While we still have you here, Sven, because we don't want to keep you up too late. No problem at all.
    14:08
    You did have a suggestion on the forum that spurred a fight. It was quite some discussion. Yes. So basically, your suggestion is that we need one more level in the Farsight tournaments, the monthly tournaments, that goes beyond gold, and that is basically a platinum level. And you were asking for basically there be 10 players in the Platinum level. Yeah. And are you saying to cap it at 10? Yeah, I would actually say 10 players. I mean, it needs to be seen with all platforms. I'm only looking at the Steam platform. It might be different on other platforms where you have lots of players more than on Steam. But in Steam, I think 10 would be quite reasonable where you have top 10 players going into platinum and you could from one month to another replace a player so have the gold player or the winner of the gold tier in one month going up a level and the lowest ranked player in platinum demoted to gold or the first two players or whatever but not like having it in gold right now, where gold is getting more and more players. Right, because they add up via percentage.
    15:41
    Exactly, exactly. And you have more players in silver than you have in gold, so you're losing like six players in gold in a tournament, but you're getting new players like, I don't know how many are in silver, like 15 players or so.
    16:00
    And so it gets more and more, the gold tier is getting bigger. And I don't think that makes sense for this kind of idea I had, where I said this should only be the real top player, elite player, who are in gold, don't see any competition for 90% of the player base. When I play and I end up in rank 15, I'm quite good. Right. Probably more like 20, 25.
    16:39
    But I'm no match against someone like Invitro, someone like Tarek, someone Gus or whoever you want. Eldar. Eldar, PinballWiz. PinballWiz, exactly. They are a league of their own, actually. Well, I'm at the point that, you know, for me, I could play a certain table, you know, 30 times, and only get my score up to, I mean, I might get into, you know, number five on that particular table. And then it's amazing how fast I get kicked right back down by these other players that are the top ten players, because they're like, wait a second, somebody bumped me? No, let me go in and play two games, and I'll take care of that. Yeah, exactly.
    17:31
    And this particular tournament is a 10-minute tournament, and we've done the five-minute tournament before, and the idea was always, oh, hey, this will make it so that the scores won't be so gargantuanly different. And, first you're told, they're still gargantuanly different. Yeah, you have your experience with a five-minute tournament where you said, well, I had a great game, five minutes, all the best I could do was shot, and then you got like 50% of the best players. Right. So it's still kind of demoralizing.
    18:11
    It does take away a little bit of the fun when you know that you just… Yeah, whatever you do. Yeah, and so where the argument came in, though, was you and I were under the standpoint of if you are up against an elite player and you are the average player and you play one game against the elite player, your odds are that the elite player is still going to beat you. what you were hoping for is that the elite player has a bad game and you have a really good game and therefore you get lucky and are able to beat that player. Yeah, actually, what was the situation we had in the tournament of the month? I had players who were better than I on every table, but since we only had two games, I could be lucky and have a very good game and the elite or better player could have two games with house balls.
    19:17
    There you have some luck involved. It's the same with you in the real-life tournaments. Right, exactly.
    19:26
    I think that's a really good approach, actually. If you lucky then you can beat this guy But if you are with like 30 games there no way you will be the elite player No way. Right, because that elite player is, out of 30 games, is probably going to have an absolutely stellar game, even by their standards.
    19:55
    My stellar game is what the elite player's average game is. That's right. It's a throwaway game, basically.
    20:04
    Yeah, so if my best game is only as good as their average game, how am I going to compete when they have enough chances to have an elite game themselves? It's never going to happen. So the only hope is the fewer games give me, the average player, a better chance of beating them. Slim as that is, it still gives me a better chance. I actually think that could be the secret here. Rather than having another tier, I actually think instigating that, that you only have two tries or something like that per tournament round, that would make people, that would really even the competition out, I think. Oh, so maybe if you're in bronze level, you have unlimited tries. If you're in silver level, you have ten tries. And if you're in gold level, you have two tries. Yeah, something like that. And so, yeah, I mean, if you're in bronze, you can grind it out until you feel like you've got the best score so you can have a hope of progressing into a higher tier. But if you're already in a higher tier, like, you've got to demonstrate that you're good and you should only need two games to stay in that higher tier. Like, you know what I mean? I've never been demoted once out of a tier. That's supposed to happen, right? You're supposed to actually drop down a level? Yeah, I don't think anybody's ever actually tested it. If you want to do that, you really need to skip some tables and just play them. Exactly. Yeah, you will never be in the last 10% because there are a lot of players in there who don't play all the tables, I think. Yeah, so you actually physically got to throw your game to get demoted. Yeah. Or only play two of the tables in the tournament. but if you don't play any of the tournament then you technically haven't entered and therefore you can't lose your position you won't get demoted you stay in the same tier forever I haven't played the tournament for several months and I was still in gold which is fine I mean you don't need to get demoted if you don't play I would have thought that at least on mobile well, you've got to progress through two screens before you get to the tournament lobby. I would have thought that that second screen would be basically, yes, I am essentially paying my money to the tournament director and I'm joining this tournament at that point. I'm not sure if it's worked like this. I think it only works once you enter your first score. Ah, okay. It counts your first score as your first sort of... I think so. I have never tried to just go into the tournament and then not... And deliberately bait us just to fail. Essentially bait us just to failure. Which maybe I should do. I can't do it for this tournament, but maybe the next one I'll actually try and test it and just see if I can do it. I think that would make sense because you want to know what tables are there. How else are you going to find out? Unless you're going to the forum and stuff to find out. That's true. That is the only way to find out, isn't it? Because they don't do it. They don't tell you what the tables are on any of the front screens. So yeah, that's fair enough. so I myself am not going to be playing in this tournament because four of the eight tables I have zero desire to play let me guess light camera action Eldorado ding ding ding what else do we have cuboid wizard ding ding ding there's also lights camera action ding ding ding one more no Fishtails is good no it's not Fishtails it is what else do we have let's see we have what else do we have let me start up the app because I can't remember off the top of my head what is the last one Chris yeah look at the list I don't know all the tables the last one I have no desire to play is Junkyard oh you're Junkyard oh yes you're right I like that table actually I like it in real life I don't like it in TPA I used to like it in real life and TPA I just it destroyed it for you it makes it far too easy and every time I look at it I don't like, there's two things I saw playing yesterday that make me cringe every time you know on the shooter lane there's like the spinning target the spinner Well, I can't unsee it now, and blame me, everyone, because I'm about to tell you as well. Oh, great. When that thing spins, the micro switch leaf doesn't move at all, so it's basically just the little arm of the spinner that goes around and around, but the micro switch is a static picture, and it just stays static. So there's no movement of the switch. I'm just going, oh, you couldn't have just animated that? It wouldn't have been that hard to do. So hard. So that's number one. Number two, which I think you probably would have all seen, is the serpentine way the crane behaves. Like the way that the ball gets flung around. Yeah. It actually goes up like a sort of like a, when you hit the ball, it will go up and sort of curve up into a U, so it will predictably hit all of the upper level targets. And I can't unsee it. It just looks so wrong when it snakes its way up to a target and hits it. it just looks really really artificial so that's the two things on the table that are really great every time I play it the fun thing is you have played it in real life right? Yeah, I haven't and a lot of those things like those you were just explaining on other tables people notice and I don't notice because I haven't seen those tables in live action, and I don't know what the real table behaves. So for me, this is the normal thing, although it might look a bit weird, but I don't know exactly where to look, like the spinner. I'm not paying attention to it because I'm...
    26:33
    Trying to work out what you need to do in the game. And it's worth mentioning, too, that these aren't show-stopping bugs. These are just weird things that happen in the game that make you go, well, that's a bit strange. Well, and in the case of Junkyard, the wrecking ball crane is such a really cool toy. It's a really cool toy on the table, and I remember it stuck out so much in my mind from playing it in real life that years later when I was thinking about pinball again and then looking for the virtual pinball forums when I was downloading those tables,
    27:17
    Junkyard was like, oh, I need to find that, I need to find that, and nobody recreated it at the time in that. And so it was one of those things where I was really excited when it came to Pinball Arcade, and then after being with it for, I mean, it didn't take long, a few minutes, I just kind of went, what's up with this table? It just doesn't have that magical thing. The thing that the other annoyance I have with it is that I don't feel that FastFight have implemented the, what would you call it? Not the captive ball, but the stage ball in the trough. Because what should happen is, like the next generation, there should always be a ball sitting in the up-kicker for the fridge. And so as soon as you plunge the ball, it should come out almost immediately at the other side.
    28:09
    And then the ball will actually then go and rest back into the fridge for the next time the ball enters that trough. And it's always slow. And this is the thing about the game. Without that feature implemented, it makes the game so slow. And that's the thing. I think that's the biggest thing about the game. that single thing, not staging the ball correctly is the thing that kills it for me I'm also not a fan of and I've mentioned this before so I'll keep it brief but I'm just not a fan of the progression through the table itself because once you get past those first five and you do the wizard goal then it's just wash and repeat there's no variation to the table whatsoever and again in real life you're not going to have that issue because you're rarely going to get that far into the game but on TPA it's like how many times? Yeah, exactly. Like in many other tables as well, yeah. Yeah.
    29:04
    So I guess this might actually bring us into another thing we're going to talk about today, right, Chris? And that was the questions answered thread. Absolutely. So you guys remember last week we mentioned that there was a Farsight employee by the name of Fredo, son of Godfather, who was offering to answer anything, and we all jumped on that. and then we got no responses and it was like, well, what was up with that? And then people were questioning if he was a real employee and then he went ahead and posted some responses and people really questioned if he was a real employee because, let's put it to you this way, if any of you have ever had interaction with Heretic and his form post,
    29:48
    it would make Heretic insane. And Heretic won't have a problem with us saying that because he knows that he's a little bit left field. Well, Heretic was actually offended that somebody was doing such a poor imitation of him.
    30:04
    It doesn't really, does it? The funny thing is I saw it live when those posts appeared one after another. I was just online at that time. And at some point I was just like, what the f***? It's like, what is this dude on? So we won't go into what actually transpired other than to say that that person is not an employee at Farsight anymore. They were an actual employee. They are no longer an employee. The rumor base of what happened after that.
    30:42
    But Mike Lindsay, the community manager, then stepped in and decided to, hey, I will answer everybody's questions. Which was really good of him to do that. It was really good of him, except for most of the responses wound up being the classic responses from Farsight, which is, yes, we plan on doing that. Yes, we would like to do that. We are looking into that in the future. We are looking into that, yeah.
    31:07
    Translation, they don't know when it's going to happen, or if it's going to happen, just they would like it to happen. So let me just run through some of the quick versions of the questions and those things. So start off with when can Star and Fimble Arcade be expected to be released? And the answer was we expect to release it late fall.
    31:28
    Yeah. Again, very non-committal. I actually don't want them to commit to a time frame on that because it's like release it when it's ready, please. Don't promise a date. Just release it when it's ready.
    31:41
    Also, we found out that for right now the The Stern Pimble Arcade app is exclusive to the Oculus VR. It's not coming to any of the other VR headsets anytime in the near future. And not even Oculus as in PC Oculus. I don't think so. Right, no, I think it's the Samsung Gear VR. Yeah, which is, so we can talk about this later, Chris, but that's a very narrow market. Yeah.
    32:14
    Then we move on to the question was, And our good friend Jeff, who used to be with us on the podcast, who, by the way, just got a brand new to him pinball machine, Circus Gottlieb. Wide body, beautiful. Huge wide body. Picked it up for a song, $600. So way to go, Jeff. Slingshot. Oh, man. Really good pickup.
    32:40
    You know what? You could give me even a Gottlieb Premier for $600, and I would go, hey, you know what? It's $600. box.
    32:48
    Any port in a store, basically. Exactly. He brought up something that me and him the very first time we went up to visit Farsight we brought this up. That was what?
    33:04
    Four years ago? I think? Yeah, about three I think. And that is about adding difficulty mode to Pinball Arcade. And the response is they ran into complications with the emulation and getting it all to function, but Bobby is assuring us that it hasn't been dropped.
    33:21
    Yeah, it's just severely deprioritized in business speak. Yeah. I'll put a business spin, because I can see this language all the time where I work, and so I can translate that into business speak for you as we go through this. Next up, is it possible that we'll get Capcom tables? Yes, it's possible. It is possible we will digitize Capcom cables in the future, which means reading between the lines, there's no restriction on them doing it. It's just that it's not a really big priority for them at this stage. Nor do we even know if they've gone so far as to secure the license. Probably not. No.
    33:58
    Okay, finally we're going to get to one that actually has an actual answer. And this is something that's been speculated on for a while, isn't it? Yes, and that is, will there be more seasons beyond season seven? And the answer is, as long as there is demand, they will keep on pumping out seasons. Which is pretty obvious really, isn't it? No!
    34:22
    I'm not going to reveal exactly the nature of the conversation that I have, but let's just say that it's not entirely obvious that they would continue because there is a certain tipping point where the money generated from all the previous seasons is more than enough to sustain the studio without having to bother with recreating tables. But the flip side is, hey, if we're still buying them and they're still making it, the more seasons that they have means even more money generated in the future.
    34:59
    Because you've got to remember that every table is a hook for somebody who loves that particular table, who may not love anything else in the product, and they may use that as a gateway drug. So every table is a gateway drug. Yep, yep. So that is very good news, those students. because we were speculating even too with the Stern Pinball app to what extent they're going to be able to keep on cranking out tables month by month.
    35:22
    So it's good to know that they're still going to be... On the other hand, it's a reply they gave before Season 6, I think, already. It's exactly the same reply.
    35:37
    I think the only thing is we don't know what the level is when they would stop making tables, when it would not be interesting for them. Correct. We don't know. We have no idea, and at the moment we just can't hope.
    35:59
    There are enough players buying new tables, and it's important they buy new tables, because if it's just the old seasons get bought, then they could think, well, the new tables are not interesting anymore. They are not generating enough revenue. So we just stick with what we have. I think the real problem that Farsight faces is that they just keep on ticking off the console owners.
    36:30
    They were lagging so far behind that it's just leaving such a bad taste in their mouth that they don't want to purchase the seasons.
    36:41
    And If you wait five months for a table to come out, odds are, if you really want to play that, you probably bought it in another format, if you bought it at all, or you just finally go, you know what, I've had enough of this program. It doesn't encourage... Or just, I'm going to a completely different game. I'm not going to play Finball Arcade anymore. You'll play Zen, which doesn't seem to have the problem. Right.
    37:08
    It's a terrible strategy. But then on the other hand, how often do they release? Twice a year? Three times is what I think. Yeah, usually about three times. That's what it will wind up.
    37:21
    Certainly not every month. Well, that's the problem with Zen. You never know when it's going to drop. You don't know how long your gap of waiting is going to be. Especially for Pinball Arcade and consoles. I think the problem is you need to go through the certification process every time. Yeah, it's incredibly expensive. And that's quite the money. Yeah, huge amount of money.
    37:47
    I was listening to a... It's expensive, but I think from Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, I heard something like $10,000 upwards. Yeah, I've heard values about that. I think I actually heard a little bit more, actually. There was this podcast I listened to from a dev studio called Butterscotch Shenanigans, and they were talking about how much it would cost them to get onto console, and I think they were saying a little bit more than $10,000. You've got to have a publisher and all this sort of stuff as well, and that really adds to the money. Well, and it's also a case of where the Sony or Microsoft can reject the program if they don't like some of the bugs that are in the program, and then you have to pay all over again. So it actually, I understand the delay that they do. It allows basically Steam to work out all the kinks, and then they can apply all those kinks into the console so that when they release the consoles, they're functioning in a manner that's not going to get them rejected.
    38:53
    It's the main problem with them releasing monthly and not being far ahead of their releases. You know what I mean? they're finishing a table and then two weeks later it's being released as opposed to finishing a table two months before it's supposed to be released. That's right. Which is what us beta testers would love because me and Jared can go off on a rant on that but we going to save that rant for a little bit later I think it sounds a bit like the head beta
    39:24
    Right. Let's move on. Black Knight, will that ever get made over? Yes, but we don't have an ETA. Well, we've been hearing that for also three years. so the more mechanical sounds will be added that was a very vague mechanical sounds added to what is it to across all platforms, are there certain platforms that are missing mechanical sounds Norman seemed to indicate in a separate response that they were planning on re-recording some things and I do believe that with Stern Pinball app absolutely everything is its own mechanical sound. Like, none of the sounds are universal across each table. It's unique for each and every single table. Every single mechanism has a particular sound file associated with it rather than a generic pool. Right. Which would stand to reason, because it's only like, you know, they've got two, maybe, I think two tables out at the moment, so they can afford to be that specific with them. Right. You know, yeah. Coming up next, the question was on Steam.
    40:35
    Theater of Magic, the mirror over the in lanes at the top is gone. It's not there anymore. And also on Monster Bash, there's this really truly horrible thing happening with multiball where it goes into ball launch look and walks there and so you're far away from the table playing multiball and it's quite annoying. was asked, hey, are these going to be fixed? And it's, yes, but there's no ATA on that. Yeah, we'll totally fix that at some point. And the thing was, they were working perfectly fine just two months ago. Yeah, so there's been a regression. And something they've done in the code to screw up the cameras and weirdness. And again, why is it that when you add in one table, that suddenly multiple tables break. I don't understand that at all. They might have been putting some extra, some different code that relates to the new table. No, because it's a complete surprise to them. They'll be like, we didn't even touch those tables. Why are they broken? Well, it could be a class on the new table they've implemented. It affects all the other classes in the other tables. That happens. Like, it's very easy to break software. Very easy.
    41:59
    So they could have actually done it. I can tell you stories about that. and it's a bit derailing but interesting nonetheless. I used to play Star Wars Galaxies, which is an MMO RPG by Sony Online Entertainment and it had so complex structures when they updated one thing in one profession. something completely in a different system, in a crafting system broke.
    42:36
    Nobody could explain how they are linked, but yeah, that happens quite often. And Star Wars Galaxy, it was more the rule like, oh, are we introducing a new feature here? Oh, let's see where it breaks, what it breaks in a system. Yeah, right. And that's exactly right. So this is what they probably found with that thing. They're going, oh yeah, we'll fix this thing that we've known about for a while, we'll just get it fixed. And then it affects all the other things in other games because another part of the game relies on that particular thing to work. It's like key functionality, and everything else isn't backwards compatible. So maybe that's where the problem is, is that they're using elements that get put into multiple tables rather than making each table its own environment. that nothing else is from.
    43:29
    Because that's what I would think it is, is that each table should be locked. If done, it's locked. When you are in the lobby and you select that table, it's like opening up that table's program rather than what it's probably doing, which is, okay, now let's open up all these assets that are shared among many tables to compile this table. I think there might be something like in the ROM emulation, which is shared as well the program itself which does ROM emulation I'm not a programmer by all means but I can imagine that there are shared functionalities across all tables at least from the same system that would definitely be its own class like the emulation thing would be its own class but adding and changing things like sound effects and those type of things that should not cause the features that we're seeing here, because that's simply just a sound file. No, or having a graphic suddenly disappear, or having your multiball all of a sudden lock into a certain view on one table. Yeah, that's strange. It's very strange. One thing is more like an asset, which has gone missing, and the other thing is in fact a functionality which is moving the camera Right, yes. Two completely different things. So I could understand the camera thing, which is funny, by the way, the Flight 2000, I only noticed it when it was posed by Pinball with one plunger camera at the moment.
    45:17
    If you select it, it looks somewhere to the ceiling or so. and it's sick in the beta and I didn't notice but when Pinball was rolled, yeah, I noticed it there.
    45:31
    Moving on down the list, we have hey, how about those Medieval Madness flippers? Oh, that again? Hey, it's on the list. It's been on the list since day one.
    45:45
    Are older sterns possible in TPA? And the answer was, yes, they might be possible. It's still possible that we will release older Stern tables to Pinball Arcade. So mental note, folks, when you're asking Stern anything, make it yes and no question. Don't give them an out of possible. Or a when. Or if you like to.
    46:06
    So this is not just the language here in that point. It's still possible that we will release older Stern tables to Pinball Arcade. That suggests that they're coming from something else. So would they be coming from the Stern Pinball Arcade? When we say older Sterns, what are we referring to? Stern Electronics or Diarist or what? Right. Older Sterns, Stern Electronic Tables, absolutely. They should belong in Pimble Arcade. But anything with a license arguably should be under the Stern Pimble Arcade banner, I would think. Well, put it this way. anything that Stern has the CAD assets for should be under that one, the new one.
    46:55
    Hey, how are those emulations for tables? It's all state tables. Yes, and it was, once again, that we're looking to putting that in the future. Yeah, that'll be done in the future for real. Okay, here we go with something that actually is definitive. and that is that they are adding physics, the new physics, into iOS tables, a few tables at a time each month, and they will do that until they are actually finished with all of them. That's good. And that will be the same for Android as well. They share the same code base. Yes. Then we get into the, hey, with Seasons 1 and 2, are there any plans on updating the graphics and the physics and the tuning and the sound?
    47:49
    And the everything. Basically, a comprehensive upgrade to bring Seasons 1 and 2 up to par with the 3 through 6. And the answer to that was, it's planned. Yep, but it's a big job. so huge job that's going to require on many tables them to completely strip their machines once again now I will say this because somebody brought this up as a question of well they may not even have these machines yet they do have all of season one and two except for going nuts that's the only table that they did not purchase yeah because of scarcity because they couldn't so Farsight does own all those tables so it's completely in the realm of possibility for them to be able to strip them down and do what needs to be done with those. That's right.
    48:42
    Then we have another definitive answer, which is somebody asked about glass reflection, and nope, they do not have any plans to add glass reflection. So if you really want it, you're going to have to dig out your Gottlieb and Williams Collection discs and play with it there.
    49:00
    Somebody asked about the match sequences on Frankenstein and Last Action Hero that I guess, I didn't notice it, but there's something that went on with the animations for those that they're either not present or something, and somebody was saying, oh, it's because they're super violent, and Farsight responded that it has nothing to do with the violence of them, but more that something went wrong with the emulation. They had to cut them, otherwise it would break the emulation. Exactly. So again, they want to add them back in at some point, but that's why they're not there.
    49:38
    I'd actually argue that we don't need match animations at all on any of the tables, but that's just me.
    49:45
    The only reason why I would want them is for the same reason that I want to have the ability... Well, not so much the stats. I want the ability to, even before entering a coin,
    50:00
    to be able to enter in those certain codes that will allow the table to moo at you or whatever. Oh, yes.
    50:06
    It's just a completion. For me, it's the completion of the table. I want to be able to... I guess the match thing is that that is a discrete component of the table. And sometimes the match animations are funny for the first five times you see them. And then you want them off because you just want to start the next game. Right.
    50:25
    I can't tell you how many times I've actually drained the ball immediately, paused the game, and put restart rather than actually sit through the match. Yep, exactly.
    50:35
    Then we got the question about Tales from the Crypt. Could it be included? And the answer is yes, it could be included, just depending on the license. So with that, we're going to say bye-bye to Pinball After Dark. You are not needed. Yep, exactly. there are Pimple After Dark is now officially dead there's no way it's going to be happening okay somebody asked about adding promodes to seasons 1 and 2 and they are not on the list which is a crime again because it's those classic it's the classic tables that don't have a promo come on we're talking medieval madness here right no promo what the actual heck Creature from the Black Lagoon No pro mode. Monster Bash, no pro mode. I mean, it's... Why, why?
    51:28
    Another definitive answer, are you planning on adding 3D to the PS4 like it was on the PS3? The answer is, not planned. No.
    51:39
    Which, yeah, I won't comment on that. Never mind. Are there... There are plans to improve the leaderboard integrity. There are plans. Again, you hear this plans a lot. We have plans. That means a bug. On the other hand, to be fair, as long as they say we have plans or we're planning on doing it, it's still a difference to know it's not on our list. Basically, it's a yes at some point, but it's on the hard nose. Depending on workload and everything, yeah. Yes, but that leads into the very next question and how that's been going, which is there's a master issues list for PC, and it's been around for some time. It's a rather large bug list, and it's, hey, how about that list? And it was, well, we tackle as many as we can each month. Well, if you have this giant list of things that are planned plus that bug list, you can guess that I would say the amount of things that are getting fixed and implemented pale and compared to the amount of things that are going wrong each month. Yeah.
    52:51
    Your list is growing faster than you can knock it off. Exactly. Especially since you get more and more tables where you have more and more issues and some things I guess they are so old and the code is so old and maybe not that good commented and documented for some of the older tables that it's hard to find the issues. Well, that is an issue. I know that Mike Reitmeyer, who does the programming, that he's been there since day one,
    53:27
    but there are platform-specific people that have not been there since day one, and there has been issues where somebody has left mid-project, and the person that takes over the project has to start at square one because they can't make head or tails of the work that was how it progressed. Terrible, terrible technical debt. It's such a problem in every organization, but in particular game developer organizations, because it's just a huge problem. You lose knowledge when you lose people.
    53:58
    Tap passing. They may tackle that at some point. Yeah, probably at some point after we fix the issues in the master list for PC and all the other ones you guys are bringing up.
    54:11
    Yeah. They are hoping for ball spin in Physics 4.0, which I believe we knew that. Again, Physics 4.0 is first going to be implemented in the Stern Pinball app. So if we see it there, then cross your fingers that it will migrate itself over to Pinball Arcade. But if they can't make it work, because with the Stern Pinball app, they're building a new engine. You know, that's why there's going to be certain demands on the equipment that you use it on.
    54:47
    So if they cannot get it working there, where they're starting from ground zero and not trying to, you know, deal with legacy issues, if it's not there, it's not going to be in Pinball Arcade. If you see it in Stern Pinball app, then I think there's at least a fighting chance we'll see it in Pinball Arcade. Yeah, that's right. Ah, the construction set the pinball construction set Oh yeah Yeah, that's been put on hold That's far from surprising The can of worms that was going to open up was phenomenally huge Oh yeah When you think about it LittleBigPlanet is an entire game devoted to allowing you to construct your own levels yeah exactly that's a full time game that you have to develop for you know Nintendo how many years did it take Nintendo to finally come out with their own Mario Maker well it only came out last year how long has Nintendo been out and people have been begging for it ever since Excitebike allowed you to create your own level on the original NES So, yeah, I always thought that that was kind of a pipe dream, and I guess they finally saw the writing on the wall too.
    56:15
    So I think we should probably jump on to now what Norman was saying about sound. So in post number 46 of that thread, he answered a question from Relaxation who asked, would recording sound straight from the speaker wire via line out converter be more accurate than whatever sound, in brackets, filtering, analog equipment, emulation TPA may or may not have.
    56:36
    And Norman, in his response, referred back to a video that was made available at the 2015 ReplayFX convention where he talked a lot about this, and he goes on to summarize, over the years, we've worked the audio for all the tables in different ways depending on the technology at the time. On the early tables, most of the time, the audio was ripped straight from the chip. This required a lot of post-processing and mixing to get things to sound right. Around the Funhaus era, we were taking a line directly out from the soundboard. This didn't work any better than the RIP. Later, and up to now, we are able to call up every sound through the speakers, either by a custom game chip or with computer software. This is really the best way. The benefit of doing this is we get the sound after it has passed through any EQs or filters in the reel table that are put in place after the sound chip. We also get a mic placement phase that allows us to keep room ambience in, more like it would be if you were really playing.
    57:35
    And that's a really good technical description. But what do you guys think of that? I think that a lot of people are quick to place the bad audio that was native to the game and place that blame on Farsight. when if they actually heard the game in real life they would realize it's not Farsight, it was the game itself I think it's a lot of difference if you hear one table in an arcade with ten other tables making noise and if you're just playing the table exclusively in Pinball Arcade where you have your ears only for that one table and all the bad noises it does or the bad sound effect it has. Not only that, not only that, Spen, but it's being able to listen back through the audio through headphones as well, which even amplifies it more. Yeah, exactly. And if you've ever been in front of a whitewater, you know that the audio was terrible. Yeah, it was just terrible. If you've been in front of a creature from the Black Lagoon, you know the audio is terrible. It not that not Farsight doing that native to the game itself Yeah so then Ben Logan goes to respond to Norman post and I think this is indicative of pretty much how everyone feels about the audio in TPA. And that is, Ben goes on to say, the biggest problem with TPA sound is the incredibly low bitrate. Yeah. Why so crunchy and compressed? Are we that worried about table download size? This is the biggest thing I have a problem with. It's what I said. over and over again that mobile is offered at 11 kHz, which is low-quality mono.
    59:25
    It doesn't need to be high-quality stereo because, of course, all these tables are represented in mono sound anyhow. So at a minimum, you should have good-quality single-channel mono, which is 22 kHz.
    59:39
    I know on PC, the bit rate is 44 kHz, which is standard stereo, which means that nothing is compressed and it's really, really clear.
    59:48
    So that's definitely something that I'd like to see improved. And it wouldn't be that hard. Just make the PC game assets available to all the other platforms and your job's done. The second biggest problem that Ben identified is the recycled mechanical sounds. And I think we were talking a little bit about this earlier in the show with Stern Pinball recording discrete sounds per machine. Now, the different machines make different mechanical sounds. I like that Farsight EM table sounds are different from the Farsight DMD games at least, but beyond that, I don't hear anything in the way of differentiation from you guys in terms of mechanical sound. Modern Stern flippers, solid-state Gottlieb flippers, and 80s and 90s William flippers all sound different. Consider starting there. And this is exactly what we were saying the other day, right, Chris? Yep. Pretty much Ben is exactly mirroring what we were saying on the podcast. he goes on to say isn't there an audio geek amongst your crew well actually I can answer that yes it's Norman is the audio geek in Farsight he is the sound producer and he is a guy who has progressed the audio to the point that it is now in the game recording unique mechanical sounds will be super easy with a simple zoom XY field recorder yeah that's totally true Ben but the problem is the Farsight audio mixer is mono only so that wouldn't be much point and man what a fun and inexpensive project for your team I can't help but think you guys are missing a real opportunity to easily boost the realism of your tables with better quality audio again it comes down to the farsight audio mixer that's in the game it's only mono capable because that's what they specced it out when they released the game and yes it would be great to have zen like audio separation with sound effects or even something like what we hear on real life tables like Wizard of Oz because that really is amazing.
    61:44
    But again, the engine is different. And like he goes on to say, the virtual pinball community really excels here, and that's true, but their emulation framework is completely different to Farsight. So that's like comparing apples with oranges.
    61:59
    So there's a lot of things in that response that are quite true. I mean, I go on to say, like, a little bit later on there, saying giving us 44 kilohertz audio on the mobile would make a huge difference when we play through headphones.
    62:15
    But yeah, audio is such a... It seems to me it's such an easy thing to fix. You change the assets from 11 kilohertz to 44, make them available on all platforms, your job is done. And the problem, I think, too, is I've heard that Norman is a little bit hard of hearing as well. So when... That's because he's a bass player. Well, that's right. Because he's got the chunky bass all the time. So Norman sometimes has a little bit of trouble hearing the differences. Like, for example, I heard a story where, as part of a beta testing request, we said, look, can you just tell Norman about the farting saucer? For those of you who don't know what the farting saucer is, it's the eject mechanism sound that happens on pretty much every single Farsight table except the Kickstarter tables because they recorded the eject noise really well on those and they sound realistic. and so could you just get him to change the farting saucer over to an actual mechanical metallic sounding sort of noise like it is on Terminator 2 you know just take Terminator 2's sound put him into all the other tables and that would be a huge step forward and I heard that you know basically he had to go into Norman's office and crank the audio up as high as it could possibly go so that he could hear the differences between the farting saucer and the T2 so this could also, again, anecdotally, this could actually be part of the problem as well. There's a little bit of trouble hearing the subtleties between audio. It could just be a case of, hey, it all sounds right to me because he is the audio director. So, yeah, it's a tricky thing. All of this comes back to me wishing that Farsight was as obsessive about the pinball tables as the guys at Polyphony Digital that does Gran Turismo are about cars where they sit there and stick mics on every part of the car at every speed of the car driving on various tracks in various environments and all for that just uber sense of realism.
    64:19
    And obviously a pinball table doesn't have nearly as many parameters as a vehicle does, but I wish there was that obsessiveness. You should at least be able to go and have all those sounds in a common sound pool, particularly in the case for Android, which needs those sounds in the Android sample, so they trigger immediately.
    64:39
    And just, like, I'm quite happy with, like, most of the mechanisms. So if you recorded a mechanism for a Williams table, like a source reject, then your chances are that across belly Williams tables across the years, that sound would not change for that mechanism. But if it's a different, if it's a specific sort of eject mechanism that's only in that game, it will sound different, and it does need to be captured discreetly. if their goal is in the mission statement to faithfully recreate every table, then that is part of that recreation strategy.
    65:11
    Hey, I want to circle back to one of the earlier questions that was answered just because it spurned a little bit of debate here. And as you and I have been accused of constantly saying, apparently, that we have no problem wanting to spend money on Pinball Arcade and far say whatever the heck they want, I took personal affront to this. So it was in regards to the updating, the comprehensive updates of Season 1 and 2. And one of the forum members, I believe his name is Xevious Zokwis, he first posited, hey, you know, I would kick in a tenor if it would mean comprehensive update. And then in vitro, who I said was on fire this week with getting in fights with everybody. With the rhetoric.
    65:59
    He said that he would drop $50 to $75, to which I'm like, that's rebuying the entire season. Yes. That's just nuts. And my thing was, why is your first response always, well, here's some money. Will that fix it? Throw money at the problem and it will go away. That's not going to fix it because it's not how Farsight is viewing it as a problem at all. And my point is, whether it's a bug, whether it's graphics, whether it's physics, you are presenting your game as a unified front.
    66:38
    All these tables are unified in one house, you might say, which is the user interface. And you should, as goodwill towards your customers, go back and make everything so that it is balanced and equal. And on top of that, these are your first two seasons which had arguably the best tables that people wanted. This should be, you know, if anybody is new to Pinball Arcade, and there are new users, ample new users every single month that are buying these seasons, those are probably the ones that they're going to purchase. This is their first taste of it. So you need to go in and update this stuff, and we all should benefit from that. It should not be a case of, oh, but you're going to have to rebuy it and redo that. Because here's the other thing. Farsight has far from proven that they can put out anything that is free of bugs. Yeah, that's right. There's no way that we can say they can do that. No. So I would anticipate that even though we'd get better graphics and better physics or better tuning, that there would still be some other new bugs introduced, and I'm not paying for any of that. If they had a history of putting out flawless product, then maybe we could say yes.
    68:03
    So then Xevious wound up responding. He basically said, well, if there's a choice of paying $10 or getting nothing, then I'd pay $10. And my thing is, well, you're the one that offered that. Farsight didn't. Yeah, exactly. How do we know that Farsight wouldn't be willing to do this without charging? We don't know that, but if you're going to all of a sudden jump and offer money, well, who would they be to be like, no, no, no, we don't want that, as instead of going, well, sure, if you want to pay us money, we'll take the money, even though they'd do it for free anyway.
    68:35
    The thing is that, as I've spoken about on many occasions, the fan form represents like 1% of the actual user base. So, yeah, sure, okay, so the fans are telling us that they're going to pay $75 for us to do the table. That's nice. The rest of the population isn't going to tell us that. They're going to say, yeah, just fix your bugs fast. What are you doing, yo? That's what they're going to be saying. And think of the practical complications. I mean, what do you want to do? You want to release two versions of the table, one which is the original version and one you only have access to if you pay another 10, 15, 75. That's right. Right. You would have two different tables you have to maintain. Exactly. Or you have to make the decision, yes, we're going to be releasing an updated pack and you all have to pay for this update. Right. Like there will be... Or you are stuck with the version you have forever. And that's no longer maintained. Yeah. Yeah, so if you want the, basically they'd have to do it through entitlements. So it's like, yes, there's a new and improved version of this table. You must rebuy it to unlock the new improved version. Would you like to spend $5 on this table or whatever, or $1 to upgrade or something like that, you know. And that's going to make people, like general people that aren't fans, go, come on, mate, what's going on here? It's like we've already paid for the table.
    70:05
    I'm not going to pay for you to fix bugs in the product. That's exactly how they're going to be thinking when they see it. And it's not like they're not adding a lot of new features, which you could do with other games where you have download content as add-on to your main game. But you are talking about a pinball, which is as it is. The only thing you can add is the pro mode. Yeah, pro and updated graphics. That's about it. And it's not like there hasn't been precedent with this. When Zen went from, well, Zen to Zen 2 on PS2 and then also with, I believe, when they did Pinball FX 2, they didn't charge.
    70:55
    They just basically said, hey, we have a new physics engine, we have new things, we want to keep all these tables, we need everybody to migrate over. So migrate over. For free. Thanks for coming. You'll still have these things. They'll be better. Somebody else brought up that Bethesda is doing this right now with Skyrim. Yeah. That's what they're doing.
    71:17
    The same with The Witcher. Right. So everybody's bringing up their, oh, well, I own Final Fantasy VII on PlayStation 1. Does that mean I'm going to get for free on PS4? No, quit using that argument. That's the wrong argument. That's the wrong... We've had this discussion many, many, many, many, many, many times. I'm not going there again because clearly you're not listening. Yeah, that's right. But then Xevious went on, and I'm going to quote him directly. He says, companies have to make enough money to keep paying salaries, and I suspect most of the reason much of this stuff isn't getting done very quickly is because Farsight has to keep producing new tables to keep money rolling in and can't afford to go back and work on old stuff that won't actually result in new money. This is faulty logic, people. Farsight is doing just fine they are not living paycheck to paycheck and being entirely dependent as I mentioned earlier they are selling full seasons or even just partial tables and stuff to new users at a rather large rate every single month okay so they've already long since written off, probably balanced the budget on all the builds and purchasing that they did for seasons 1 through 4.
    72:41
    Those are entirely paid off. Every ounce of money that's coming in now is gravy. And apparently there's plenty of gravy coming in. Alright? And it can't be. Because we don't know their revenue. You can pretty much put two and two together and get four. Right. Now, the flip side of that is you saying, oh, well I'll pay $10 so that they can hire a new employee. again, it doesn't work that way.
    73:05
    You're not going to hire somebody to fix something off the promise that people are going to be paying money. You need that money guaranteed coming in order to afford this person.
    73:19
    You can't hire someone and say within one or two months fix this and then you are laid off again. take some time to get these people up to speed. Yeah, exactly. It's like saying, sure, look, we'll hire you, but we won't actually give you the money until six months after you join. Right. Because that's when we'll actually start getting revenue in from the sale. When I work on a movie or a TV show,
    73:51
    we're working under the idea that, yes, they already have the money and enough to cover the production, And then when the movie is released, that's when the production hits the bank or wins the jackpot or whatever. That's what they're gambling on. But they're not telling us crew members, oh, hey, yeah. We'll give you shares in this movie that will become dividends when we actually release it. There's no one that works like that. Although I have argued that they should do that. We have various tiers of employment. one of which is basically called a tier one and it's literally less than half of what our normal standard rate is and those are the when you get the phone call it's always we've got this wonderful cast and it's a really great script to which I say I could care less how strong your cast or script is because I get paid the same no matter what now if you want me to actually care then yeah how about if the movie is successful and reaches a certain point then you pay me up to what my full rate would have normally been. Then I'll actually care about that kind of argument and be concerned for the kind of project that I would choose to work on.
    75:04
    But yeah, no, it's putting the cart in front of the horse here with this stuff, and we don't need to entitle Farsight or any game company to purposely not do a good job on their product, only so that we can pay more for them to do it properly later on. That's right. It's what drives everybody nuts with these games that get released where you find out that, oh, they didn't complete the final three levels and that's going to be released as downloadable content later that you have to pay for. Yeah, that's right.
    75:37
    Yeah, no, it's infuriating. But, you know, I think we just need to stop trying to suggest that these companies can operate on the cap-in-hand sort of way of doing things. Because generally, people that aren't fans really don't care. Yeah. And that's what it comes down to. Yeah.
    75:58
    Well, Jared, we don't have time to go off on complaints about beta testing. No, we don't. Because we're well and truly running long today. Well and truly. Yeah. I blame Sven. See, this is what happens. Yeah, it's entirely my fault. Yeah, all your fault, Sven. thank you for being our enabler for running long yet again because we don't really need an enabler because we do it anyhow yeah I know hey Sven if you want to an excuse for that I'm perfectly fine very good if people want to follow Sven on Twitter he is which is and if you want to follow Jared it's at Jared Morgs. If you'd like to follow myself, it's at ShutYourTraps. But most importantly, why don't you follow the show at Blockade on Twitter, or visit us at our website, blockadepinball.com. You can email us at blahblahblockade at gmail.com. And there's stuff that you can buy, but you know what? I'm not going to pitch that today, because we're running long. Yeah.
    77:06
    Check the show notes. Yeah, check the show notes. Good stuff. Thank you for popping in, Sven. Really appreciate the added comments. Lots and lots that we were... Lots and lots that we ranted about, so that was all good stuff.
    77:23
    And you know what? None of it was really planned until this week when things were happening on the forum. So make things happen on the forum, and who knows? Maybe that'll influence what the show becomes. That's right.
    77:33
    So until next week, play some pinball, eh? See you later. Bye. WizardAmusement.com the West Coast League of Classic Pinball. Makers of custom pinball shooter rods and buyer specifications. Swap out your standard ball plunger with something themed to your specific table. Installs in less than five minutes with no custom tools. Even if you don't own a table, looks great as a pinball memento to admire. Prices start at $39, but mention Blockade Podcast and receive 10% off your order. WizardAmusement.com Sales, restoration, customization.
    78:12
    Don't forget to leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast hosting service that BlindPay is delivered to. We can't approve unless you tell us how. Now stop listening and place it in ball.