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Influencing the Back End of the Field

BlahCade Pinball Podcast·podcast_episode·38m 32s·analyzed·Jul 18, 2016
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TL;DR

Blockade hosts defend against accusations of controlling Farsight; discuss tournament strategy and community influence.

Summary

Chris and Jared discuss their actual influence (or lack thereof) on Farsight Studios' decisions after Pinball Profile podcast accused them of controlling the company through vocal minority advocacy. They clarify they merely act as community feedback conduits, not decision-makers. The hosts also detail their experience in a Major League Pinball tournament on Pinball Arcade, highlighting how five-minute tournament formats differ strategically from the standard 20-minute format, and sharing frustration about competitive scoring disparities.

Key Claims

  • Pinball Profile podcast (Don and Jeff) accused Blockade of being a vocal minority that controls Farsight Studios' decision-making

    high confidence · Chris: 'I was listening to the boys from the Pinball Profile podcast, Don and Jeff, and they were suggesting that we are the reason why Farsight does everything they do.'

  • Blockade hosts have direct communication with Farsight staff but no actual influence on table selection, UI design, or major features

    high confidence · Chris: 'Jared and I do have people at Farsight that we can and have talks with. However, our influence, nobody listens to us... when it comes to things like the new UI, things like Head-to-Head, certainly when it comes to table choices, nah, we have nothing.'

  • Farsight previously stated they would need to charge $10 per table without Kickstarters, and Stern licensing agreements likely include revenue-sharing minimums

    medium confidence · Jared: 'based off of what Farsight had said in the past, where they were saying, I think it goes back as far as Twilight Zone, where they're saying, hey, we would need to charge $10 a table if we didn't do the Kickstarter.'

  • Major League Pinball tournament on Pinball Arcade had ~383 participants with only 20-30 recognizable forum regulars out of nearly 400 players

    high confidence · Chris: 'looking at the total amount of players that we had in the tournament, I think it was like 383, something of that nature, almost 400 people. But when I went through the names of all the players, I didn't recognize the majority of them... maybe 20 to 30 people from our forum.'

  • Five-minute tournament format is strategically superior to 20-minute format for competitive play because it eliminates dead time and forces decisive play

    medium confidence · Chris: 'I really enjoyed the five-minute length... real quickly you could determine, ah, I need to ditch this game. Or you can be like, oh, I'm on a run and hopefully I'll get a good score at the end of five minutes.'

  • Jared scored 2+ billion points on Creature from the Black Lagoon in 5 minutes but placed 6th-8th; a player named Tarek scored 4.7 billion

    high confidence · Jared: 'My best score, I wound up scoring just a little over 2 billion points in five minutes... Eighth place. For sure. Jeez, in five minutes? However, Tarek scored 4.7 billion. Oh boy. I don't see how that's physically possible.'

Notable Quotes

  • “We're merely, you might say, that we take the input that we get at pinballarcadefans.com, follow it up into a couple of comments, and then tell them about it... We're kind of the conduit for what we're sensing the community.”

    Chris Freebus @ ~10:30 — Direct rebuttal to Pinball Profile's accusation of influencing Farsight; clarifies the hosts' actual role as community feedback intermediaries rather than decision-makers.

  • “I would rather Farsight charge a little more per table than beg us every single time because that's what it amounts to for me. To me, it's passing the hat.”

    Jared Morgan @ ~4:40 — Explains Jared's pricing advocacy as preference for direct pricing over Kickstarter model; creates perceived conflict with affordability advocates.

  • “If they cut the price, they would need to get double the amount of people purchasing all the table packs right to make ends meet with the current expenses.”

    Jared Morgan @ ~7:50 — Economic argument about volume sales model viability for lower pricing; suggests pricing criticism lacks understanding of unit economics.

  • “The thing I loved about the five-minute tournament was that real quickly you could determine, ah, I need to ditch this game. Or you can be like, oh, I'm on a run and hopefully I'll get a good score at the end of five minutes.”

    Chris Freebus @ ~33:00 — Key insight into tournament format preferences; suggests shorter time limits reduce sunk-cost frustration and improve strategic decision-making.

  • “I honestly don't believe you can get multi faster than I got, because literally I was getting the kiss lane off the plunge... I'd love to get him on hey and just get him to have a chat about how he achieved that.”

    Jared Morgan @ ~43:00 — Expresses skepticism about a competitor's exceptional score; reveals desire to understand elite-level tournament strategy.

  • “We're not employees. No, we're not. We're really not. We're, uh, yeah, we're just two dudes with a few opinions about digital pinball.”

    Chris Freebus / Jared Morgan @ ~11:40 — Humorous but emphatic rejection of insider status; reinforces central claim about lack of institutional influence.

Entities

Chris FreebuspersonJared MorganpersonPinball ProfileorganizationDonpersonJeffpersonFarsight StudioscompanyTarekpersonMajor League PinballorganizationBlockade Podcastorganization

Signals

  • ?

    business_signal: Digital pinball licensing agreements (Bally Williams, Stern) likely include revenue-sharing minimums that constrain pricing flexibility; volume-based lower pricing would require doubling player base to break even.

    medium · Jared: 'For them to do that, they need to adopt a volume sales model... if they cut the price, they would need to get double the amount of people purchasing all the table packs right to make ends meet.'

  • ?

    community_signal: Pinball Profile podcast publicly accused Blockade of being a 'vocal minority' controlling Farsight Studios' business decisions, particularly pricing and feature implementation.

    high · Chris: 'I was listening to the boys from the Pinball Profile podcast, Don and Jeff, and they were suggesting that we are the reason why Farsight does everything they do.'

  • ?

    community_signal: Pinball Arcade forum community (pinballarcadefans.com) is dramatically smaller than total active player base; tournament of ~383 players yielded only 20-30 recognizable forum members, suggesting forum influence on platform decisions is limited to small engaged subset.

    high · Chris: 'I didn't recognize the majority of them. I mean, there's probably maybe, I don't know, maybe 20 to 30 people from our forum whose name I could kind of like, oh, yeah, I recognize them. But that's out of, you know, almost 400.'

  • ?

    competitive_signal: Tournament gameplay analysis: Jared achieved 2+ billion points/8th place on Creature from the Black Lagoon in 5 minutes; unknown player 'Tarek' scored 4.7 billion (2.3x higher), suggesting either perfect execution or potential rule exploitation/glitch.

    medium · Jared: 'My best score, I wound up scoring just a little over 2 billion points in five minutes... However, Tarek scored 4.7 billion. Oh boy. I don't see how that's physically possible.'

Transcript

groq_whisper · $0.116

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 Freebus. Joining me as always, my co-host, Jared Morgan. G'day Chris, how's things today? Things are peachy keen, I must say. That's good. They're pretty much like that for me as well. Yes, I just got a new t-shirt in the mail that I had ordered up. I love all things aliens.
0:55
When I say aliens, I mean the movie Aliens, not Little Green Men Aliens. and yes, I got a new T-shirt that looks like the alien is on all fours. It's all cutie drawing. It kind of looks like a My Little Pony to the point that it even has the logo that says My Little Alien. Yes.
1:16
If you have a link to that, we can put it in the show notes. Just send me the link, and I'll chuck it in. Yeah, I'll see if I can look at it. The campaign for the shirt has already ended. I don't know if you can buy it anymore. But they were actually running the site that does this, has been doing all sorts of alien-related shirts. About every two weeks they put a new one up. It's very similar to what we have going on with represent.com with our blockade shirt. This was a completely different website, but it's the exact same thing, where it's a campaign that runs for an X amount of time. Anybody that gets in their orders within that limited amount of time, then the campaign ends, and that's the end of that shirt, basically. Yeah, right. It's like limited run stuff. They're pretty cool, actually, because if you see something you really like, you know it's going to be done pretty quick and you'll get it. I think T-Fury do that type of thing as well. There's plenty of websites that do T-shirts out there, of course. Truth be told, I've seen some of the logos that they've had with the Alien shirts. I've seen them on other websites, I think Busted Tees or ThinkGeek, something of that nature. But it's and at those times they've been maybe a little less expensive because this was 20, 21 bucks. So after shipping, it wound up being 26 bucks, I think, for the shirt. So I've certainly gotten T-shirts for less, but it's right there in the price point of what we are selling our shirt for. I mean, it's exactly the same price, actually, I should say. Yeah. So for anybody that's not being able to do those, you know, trying to sell a shirt and can't promise a mass number of shirts being sold. I think this is the smart way of going because you're not having to be stuck with a whole bunch of shirts. And, you know, you might not actually make as much money if you do like the bulk run of shirts and like get 20 of each size and then have to sell them afterwards. I think the profit margins for that are higher. I think we looked into that. Yeah, but the risk is a big thing like you just don't know how many people would actually want to do it I mean we if we went down that path and bought 20 of each size We would have been left holding a pile of inventory that no one's really wanting to buy right and it's better as well Because then you can go well, you know this design isn't working If we have a graphic designer on staff, which we both don't

  • Blockade acts as a 'triage person' translating community feedback into business requirements for Farsight, similar to their day job as technical writer/BA

    high confidence · Chris: 'I kind of rolled up all their feedback and then put it into the beta channel... I'm sort of acting like a triage person because in my job what I do as a technical writer and also I'm moving into a slightly different sort of BA style role, business analyst role.'

  • “There's nothing like actually having a lot of that rolled up into sort of like a few ideas for them. I guess, you know, we do that.”

    Chris Freebus @ ~12:50 — Acknowledges limited value-add function of synthesizing community sentiment for Farsight review.

    • Stern Pinball
    company
    Zen Studioscompany
    pinballarcadefans.comorganization
    Pinball Arcadeproduct
    Kateperson
    Bally Williamscompany
  • ?

    competitive_signal: Five-minute tournament format produces fundamentally different optimal strategies than 20-minute format: forces early elimination decisions, reduces dead-time frustration, emphasizes consistency over variance management.

    high · Chris: 'I really enjoyed the five-minute length because currently... 20-minute game, it's one of those things where you can, you don't know how many extra balls you're going to go for.'

  • ?

    event_signal: Major League Pinball tournament on Pinball Arcade: ~383 Steam players, 5-minute time limit format, prizes included MSI gaming laptop and Stern-signed translights; minimal marketing (one tweet, one Facebook post).

    high · Chris: 'looking at the total amount of players that we had in the tournament, I think it was like 383, something of that nature... It was only on Steam... I only saw one tweet from Farsight promoting it. And again, that was a tweet.'

  • $

    market_signal: Digital pinball pricing criticism on Pinball Profile podcast suggests market demand for lower table costs ($0.99-$2.50 range); Blockade hosts counter that unit economics and licensing constraints prevent sustainable lower pricing.

    medium · Jared: 'they're right in the perspective that if Farsight were able to lower the prices, they would arguably probably get more players... But that's kind of a risk when you don't really know.'

  • ?

    community_signal: Blockade hosts function as informal UX testers/feedback triagers, translating community forum sentiment into business requirements for Farsight product teams (UI, bugs, features) based on their day-job BA/technical writing expertise.

    high · Chris: 'I kind of rolled up all their feedback and then put it into the beta channel... I'm kind of doing that now, kind of, in a very sort of top level way for people like Kate. Again, not getting paid for it.'

  • ?

    business_signal: Blockade hosts advocate for higher Farsight table pricing ($2.50-$5.00) over Kickstarter model to avoid community tension and division; position premium pricing as sustainable alternative to crowdfunding.

    medium · Jared: 'I would rather Farsight charge a little more per table than beg us every single time... that's what it amounts to for me. To me, it's passing the hat.'

    • 3:38
    We could actually go right well let's like throw up a different design or something like that. Do what the, um, the double danger team do. Cause they've got great shirts. I've got a couple of their shirts, awesome stuff. Um, and yeah, they just throw up a new design every now and again, keep it fresh. So that's a really, yeah, that's really good as far as like keeping the wrist down again. Well, since we're talking about it right now, I might as well just throw out our link. If you want to block a t-shirt, go to represent.com forward slash blockade dash shirt. Pick one up. You'll enjoy it. Yeah, that's good. Hey, So you informed me this week that a certain podcast has taken issue with us. Yeah, that's right. I was listening to the boys from the Pinball Podcast, Don and Jeff, and they were suggesting that we are the reason why Farsight does everything they do. Because it's just the vocal minority. Everything that they do, not just pricing. Yeah, so it's the vocal minority are the ones that control what Farsight Studios do, which really is not true at all.
    4:43
    So, yeah, I think the points they raised, I'm trying to remember what they were talking about, but it was to do with the fact that, you know, we advocate for the high prices because, you know, like with regard to Stern Pinball and stuff, like I think at one point we said, you know, I remember me saying that, you know, I'd be happy to pay $30 a table for. Yeah, that was you. Yeah, that was me. And that's only because, for me, I don't have access to Stern pinball tables. So $30 down here in Australia with the price per play is, you know, it's $2 a game for a brand-new Stern. So that's 15 plays on a real pinball machine. Paying $30 for me is nothing because, you know, longevity-wise, I have it forever, and I can play it as much as I like. Right now, Jared, you're digging a hole for yourself. You're proving the point of what these gentlemen were saying. Yeah, but that doesn't mean that's my opinion. That doesn't mean that Palsy is going to do it because it's one person out of like 850 player base at the moment. I'm not an influencer.
    5:59
    Sorry. Here's the deal. Well, I would be happy to pay $2.50 per table, right? Yeah. I mean, if you wanted to take on Zen's pricing model, I would not discourage you in the least. However, I'm also aware of certain realities, and that is at a certain price point, we just plain won't get tables. So I'm very much aware of what kind of prices will get us the kind of tables that we're now asking for. And when it comes to the Stern tables, we can either have them do a Kickstarter for every single table that is Stern, which I'm pretty much on record as saying I hate the Kickstarters. I really don't like them either. No, I don't like them at all. I don't like the message that it sends out. And I would rather Farsight charge a little more per table than beg us every single time because that's what it amounts to me. To me, it's passing the hat.
    7:04
    And I would rather them charge a little bit more and have everybody have to pay into this and then us get the table rather than having it being Kickstarter where we've got them. Because it kind of creates a divide. You get those people that push the money into the Kickstarter and then feel that they're better than everybody that didn't pay. And then you've got all the people that are like, well, there's no way in hell that I'm going to pay into a Kickstarter. Farsighted should be ponying up the money themselves, especially since the table is just going to come anyway, because they're pretty much counting on the fact that the Kickstarter people are going to fund the thing. So we've yet to have an instance where it hasn't been funded.
    7:44
    And if a Kickstarter was not funded, I can imagine that both sides would then be at absolute war with each other and hating Farsighted in the process. So my point is get rid of the Kickstarter completely. stop that tension that it creates in the community from even being a thing. So, yeah, I believe that by raising the price, and based off of what Farsight had said in the past, where they were saying, I think it goes back as far as Twilight Zone, where they're saying, hey, we would need to charge $10 a table if we didn't do the Kickstarter. And, hey, look at how much these new Sterns are, at least on Gear VR. Who knows if the price will change? I doubt it. But, anyway, it's $10 for a new table. So the other thing that I'm thinking is, is that Stern obviously does not want this to prevent their table sales. So I think it is that fine little dance of what makes all parties happy. Yeah, it's a it's a very tricky thing. I mean, I like Don and Jeff said that, you know, they really wanted they expect to pay something like Zen prices for the tables or, you know, even I think they suggested 99 cents for a table, which, you know, can you imagine? There are some 99 cent tables out there on Google Play, but there's nothing I want to play for 99 cents.
    9:09
    So, you know, there is a minimum viable amount of money that the studio needs to be able to function. and that well you gotta you gotta think too every single table that is sold a portion of that sale goes to the licensor and the licensor i don't think is going to be none too happy with being told hey we just discounted your license yes you going to get x amount there probably agreement in place about how much revenue they need to pay back to belly Williams and the other stakeholders like Stern So that would play a part in the price that they have to set And it also the issue of exchange rates as well Like for me, like the advertised price over here in Australia is higher than it is over in the US. Like a season pass, I think it's something like 35 or something or 30. Yet, you know, I will be paying about 40 over the years for it because of exchange. So, you know, it's just one of those things. Like, they've got to have a set amount of money to make ends meet, and that is the reality of it. But to answer John and Jeff's, to retort to John and Jeff's comments, I think, like, they're right in the perspective that if Fastlight were able to lower the prices, they would arguably probably get more players in and would satisfy those players that maybe are on the fence about paying five bucks a table but that's kind of a risk when you don't really know for them to do that they need to adopt a volume sales model and I don't think at the current position they're in at the moment that that's something they could really sustain like you know for example if they have price they would need to get double the amount of people purchasing all the table packs right to make ends meet with the current expenses. So, you know, it's all well and good to say, yeah, have the price make it cheaper. But, you know, the scale of sales that they need to achieve to do that just wouldn't sustain them, I don't think. Well, I mean, you've got to figure that any of the past builds are now gravy, you might say. You know, there was a certain point where they hit where it's, you know, hey, we've reached this amount of sales. We have now officially paid for all development costs and, you know, time spent on that particular table. So you would arguably say, Hey, season one could be discounted heavily, uh, because it's already paid for itself. You know what I mean? Um, and there's also the argument and this, this happened a lot with when steam would put stuff on sale, like an indie company would put a game on sale for 99 cents that normally was 10 bucks. And all of a sudden they'd get just a huge amount of sales on it. Well, that company was trying to make a name for themselves. get into a headline, make people have their game and get it part of a discussion. With pinball, well, there's really only three options out there right now, right? I mean, there's pinball arcade, there's Zachariah, and there's Zen. You don't need to wave your flag around and say, notice me, notice me, because this is the equivalent of EA, Activision, and... EA, Activision, and I don't know, the other big player in video games back in the day. Yeah. So, you know, it's like these are the within this little tiny niche. These are the big dogs. It'd be who's that company that did the the robot pinball? Oh, Color Monkey. Yeah. They're the kind of company that would benefit from severely slashing their price. Yes, that's right. Because, you know, it will get more people essentially buying a table that's a little bit old now. And it will get some more sales for them, but it's already pretty affordable, that one. Right. Yeah. It's such a shame. They actually had, as an aside, that one actually had a release on iOS as well for a different table.
    13:00
    It's like an atomic pinball collection, they called it, and it never made it to Android. And I'm just so disappointed because they had a Mexican wrestling themed pinball. Yeah. Which looked so good. Yeah, that's right. It looked great. and I just would have really liked the opportunity to play it. But sadly, I don't think they're ever going to port it.
    13:20
    Now, as for our influence with Farsight. Let's talk about that. Yes. Jared and I do have people at Farsight that we can and have talks to. However, our influence, nobody listens to us. We're merely, you might say that we take the input that we get at pimblearcadethan.com. Follow it up into a couple of comments and then tell them about it. Exactly. So we're kind of the conduit for what we're sensing the community, what their community's temperature is, and kind of saying, hey, guys, you know, we're getting a lot of reports about this particular bug. Can you please look at it? Or, hey, there's been a lot of complaints about, you know, X, Y, or Z. focus your attention please on that but when it comes to you know things like the new ui things like uh head-to-head that's being semi-baited right now uh certainly when it comes to table choices nah we have nothing we can keep on nagging them until such time as they might go well you know what i seem to remember that jared might have been talking about this particular right Maybe let's talk about that, but that's not what I'd call influence. That's just the right table came into sale at the right time, which means that they can therefore buy it. And they would have actually done a whole lot of other calculations about whether it's viable, if it's popular, all those sort of things that they would have done before buying the table and deciding to convert it. Not me. Or Chris. you know now it's funny like if farsight wanted to invite us into a you know video conference call for one of their weekly uh sessions of what's going on with the game we'd be more than happy to throw our two cents in but yeah they haven't invited us no they haven't we're not employees no we're not we're really not we're uh yeah we're just two dudes with a few opinions about digital pinball just a few funny it's funny you mentioned the whole you know we act as advocates thing because there was a uh leading into to that there was a thread open on the android forum for pinball arcade fans and it's about feedback about the new ui and it started off quite negative of course because there were a few rough edges with the ui and then it started to go into a little bit more specific details about things and some guys were bringing up some issues about how android manager's state or like where you like close the app it should actually like completely shut down the app and and get it out of memory right that's sort of how android works and they suspected it wasn't doing that so we had a discussion in the forum and i kind of rolled up all their feedback and then put it into the beta channel um the feedback notes in there so i'm sort of acting like a triage person because in my job what i do as a technical writer and also i'm moving into a slightly different sort of BA style role, business analyst role. As I do that, I go and interview people and I get the way they expect something to work and then I translate that into business requirements. I'm kind of doing that now, kind of, in a very sort of top level way for people like Kate. Again, not getting paid for it just because it's a logical thing to do. Jared, we've got to figure out a way to get paid for our opinions. Yeah, we do. It'd be really nice. Like, you know, we have the internet now. It's not like we have to actually be in Big Bear. We could be video consultants. We could call in and lend our, scare quotes, expertise.
    16:58
    And I'm sure they'd benefit greatly from it. We're the freelance opinions. I think it's more than that, though. I know that Farsight do have a lot of dudes that are sort of hanging around in the forum, I'm just sort of testing, I guess, the zeitgeist of what's going on in there at the moment.
    17:19
    But there's nothing like actually having a lot of that rolled up into sort of like a few ideas for them. I guess, you know, we do that. Well, and I'll tell you, our influence, not saying yours and I's, but the Pimble Arcade fans' forum influence, based off this tournament that just ran I'll tell you an interesting thing that I noticed with that but first a word from a new sponsor oh yeah so loot crates I wonder if anyone got on those last week when we were sort of talking about it because I was looking back through the past loot crates in their website and it's pretty cool stuff I've sort of I think we worked out the kind of pattern that you get with the crates we were talking about this just before the show It's like you're almost guaranteed of getting a new shirt in every crate. And then some other bits and pieces, like it could be like in April's crate, there was a David Bowie from Labyrinth shirt and some Harry Potter stuff. And there's actually Harry Potter socks and just all sorts of random stuff. So you're almost guaranteed of getting a new item for your wardrobe plus cool stuff. You know what I mean? Yeah, little geeky tchotchkes that, you know, the kind of thing that, well, Comic-Con is coming up, and it's the kind of little things that you'd probably scoop up and throw into your bag, and then when you get home, you add it all up, and you go, oh, my God, I spent how much on all that? And here you wouldn't even have to go to Comic-Con. It would just come right to your house. All you have to do is go to trylootcrate.com forward slash blockade, enter in the code BRIDGETEN. That'll get you 10% off your first order, and next thing you know, you're getting a gift in the mail every single month.
    19:10
    And who doesn love getting those Shoot I get the Shave Club box in the mail and it always kind of like oh yeah that I mean it razors and I getting excited about that Imagine if it was clothing and little things that you put on your desk. Yeah, cool stuff. That's pretty wicked. So, yeah, get on it. Give it a go. And if you do, we'd love to see your pictures. Absolutely, yeah. That'd be awesome.
    19:37
    So, yeah, give it a go and see what you think. I mean, you can cancel it any time if you want. So you could sign up and give it a go for three months and then get rid of it if you didn't like it. So they're pretty open with the way you can manage your commitment. So it's really good. You're not locked in. One more time, go to trylootcrate.com forward slash blockade. So, Jared, I mentioned about the tournament and that boy ran in and said he created a mascot for us. So I don't know if we're going to be if I can show this to the camera. This won't be visible to you, our listeners, but my boy likes to make little paper figures. So he drew a steel pinball with flippers for arms and is calling this the blockade mascot. I love it. Maybe I'll take a picture and put it on Twitter for everybody to see. Yeah, I think we need to make him into plushies.
    20:26
    You know what? There's a website for that, too. I'm sure there is. No, there is. They take kids' drawings and convert them into stuffed animals. There you go. Of course there's a website for that. Of course. So we had a tournament within Pinball Arcade that was hosted and run by Major League Pinball. They were giving away to the top 50 placers a chance to be in a drawing for an MSI gaming laptop, which was plenty motivation for me to go ahead and play my heart out. So and then if you place in the top 100, they're giving away signed three different signed translights from Stern for various tables.
    21:13
    So looking at it was only on Steam and looking at the total amount of players that we had in the tournament, I think it was like 383, something of that nature, almost 400 people. But when I went through the names of all the players, I didn't recognize the majority of them. I mean, there's probably maybe, I don't know, maybe 20 to 30 people from our forum whose name I could kind of like, oh, yeah, I recognize them. But that's out of, you know, almost 400. So you think about that, that we actually do have quite a bit of sway in terms of Farsight valuing our opinion in the fan forum.
    22:01
    Because you realize just how small our forum is compared to the vast amount of players that are out there that don't hop onto the forum. And that's just people that signed up for this tournament, which wasn't wildly advertised,
    22:18
    unless you happen to be in the app and was like, yeah, I wonder if there's a tournament running and clicking on that. I only saw one tweet from Farsight promoting it. And again, that was a tweet. I think maybe there was a post on Facebook, and that was about the end of it. It wasn't like a daily promoted instance. I can only imagine how many players are actually out there, but those players aren't having the access to Farsight actually reading what goes on in the fan forum and taking that kind of stuff into account. They only see what's out there as far as what's publicly available. I mean, it's not to say that Kimble Arcade fans get any inside work. We don't. We just, I guess, take what's released publicly and then extrapolate it. like any forum does really any group of people who are enthusiastic about something um so yeah it's i think some people the people that typically would be on facebook or you know maybe twitter to an extent are just consumers they just don't they don't really have a lot of um investment in it they go oh yeah good a new table release whatever when's when's adam's family coming out.
    23:35
    It's already out. When did it come out? I don't know. Why wasn't I told? Is there a Simpsons table yet? Oh, shut the hell up. Sorry, Simpsons table.
    23:47
    Yeah, it'll be really great. Simpsons pinball party like every month. Yeah. And when that comes out, it'll be... Where's Lord of the Rings? It'll be barbed wire. Barbed wire?
    24:02
    So, you know, So they just want the – they're just classic consumers, and that's fine because, you know, they are offering a product, Farsight, and the consumers out there will do consumer things, and that's fine. So let me tell you a little bit about this tournament, though. It was different. Like I said, I think Farsight basically – I mean, they didn't have really anything to do with it other than it was, hey, use our system and do this tournament. as we mentioned last time 10 tables were selected it was five minute time limit and yeah i mean that was that was the thing so after having played in it i really enjoyed the five minute length because currently farsight has a new tournament running on steam and it's their typical monthly tournament and it's back to the 20 minute length the thing i loved about the five minute tournament was that real quickly you could determine, ah, I need to ditch this game.
    24:59
    Or you can be like, oh, I'm on a run and hopefully I'll get a good score at the end of five minutes. Whereas a 20 minute game, it's one of those things where you can, you don't know how many extra balls you're going to go for, you know, and be able to run on. You don't know if that one ball is going to last you 10 minutes or 30 seconds. You know, you can have that bad first ball and still hold out hope that ball two and three are going to take you to the promised land. But the flip side of that is, and I remember this specifically happening to me with Ripley's, which is a table that I know intimately, I know exactly how to score, and I can run it for 45 minutes plus. So the 20-minute time limit, I'm feeling the crunch of that 20 minutes. I know what can be done and what can be achieved in that amount of time. But I'd play it for, I'd be going for 15 minutes, and all of a sudden I'd have a bad streak that lasted a minute, and I'd realize, nope, I'm not going to make the score that is needed because that one minute is all the amount of time that I needed to propel myself up to the upper stratosphere. And so then I'd dump the game. Well, great. So now I just spent 15 minutes wasted knowing that I need the perfect 20-minute game. that eats up a lot of your time and makes you hate a table real quick yeah absolutely it just saps the life out of you when you're doing that hey yeah this is opposed to playing the five minute tournament which now the table that was utterly frustrating me was creature from the black lagoon again another table that i have no problem running 45 minutes on yeah now i've got five minutes so it's not only was it a matter of okay how do i most efficiently get through everything and get the best score possible. Yep. Which I thought I had done. And then I looked on the leaderboard and was like, you gotta be kidding me. Tarek scored. What? How did that, how is that possible in five minutes? Yeah. So I buckled down a little harder and it got to the point where I could hit multi-ball consistently get into the multi-ball aspect of it in a minute, maybe 55 seconds, maybe a minute, five, but it was right around there, plus or minus five seconds.
    27:22
    Then it was a matter of finding the girl, which sometimes can take you three shots. Again, if you're running this perfectly, it takes you three shots to find her, maximum. And then it's shooting the balls up into the multiplier, getting up to that four-time multiplier. Well, that stuff takes a set amount of time. So by the time I got the multiplier up to four times. And sometimes that would be firing both balls into it, again, getting it as quickly as humanly possible.
    27:53
    I'd look at the little countdown timer at the bottom, and it would say I had two minutes, 42 seconds left, or whatever. And consistently, that was what was clocking in. So now it's a matter of collecting your jackpot, collecting the super jackpot, and redoing everything. Finding the girl again, and then collecting the jackpot, and then supering again. Well, of course, each time you do that, the bumpers, you've got to hit the bumpers more times for that super jackpot. My best score, I wound up scoring just a little over 2 billion points in five minutes. That's pretty good. Right? I thought so. It was good enough to get me to, what was it, sixth place, I think? Sixth or eighth place, I can't remember which. That's incredible. Eighth place. For sure. Jeez, in five minutes? That's like my 20-minute game. However, Tarek scored 4.7 billion. oh boy I don't see how that's physically possible was he just able to do everything that you did but like three times as fast well that just it though I honestly don believe you can do get two multi faster than I got Because literally I was getting the kiss lane off the plunge. If you time it right, you can score it immediately. I would immediately shoot into the snack bar, light up one of my four target lights that I need to get. That ball would flow down. I'd shoot it straight up into the lanes. Sometimes I'd get lucky and with four bounces get all four lanes lit and then it'd drop down. And then I'd shoot the snack bar three more times.
    29:22
    Again, this is not missing. Just every time, just go bam, bam, bam, bam. Then it'd downshift to my left flipper. I'd shoot the right lane, the slide, get that going. Now multi-ball is ready for me, right? The only way that you can get quicker with finding the girl is if you hit her on, if you find her on your first shot, which I always went for the easy shot, which was a snack bar. but finding her is going to take anywhere from like I said maybe 5 seconds right off the bat to 20 seconds if you're quick shooting the kiss lane and the slide lane but then it's collecting that multiplier, it takes some time because that ball's got to travel it's got to go around the funnel and drop down and then you've got to fire it again that takes a physical amount of time, there's no speeding that up so all I can figure is that after he collected the first super jackpot,
    30:16
    that he was able to find the girl immediately with one shot, shoot two balls up into the lanes, collect all of his pop bumpers immediately. Because I should say that what I did was I got two super jackpots and three jackpots. I never was able to get to the third super jackpot. But he would have had to have gotten not only that third super jackpot, but probably a fourth regular jackpot and maybe even a fifth super jackpot. maybe even a fourth super jackpot i'd love to get him on hey and just get him to have a chat about how he achieved that in the in the tournament because i actually think it would be really interesting to hear how a player at that level in pimple like hey it does that you know what i mean it had to be a perfect run that's just it had to have been an absolute perfect run with no misses whatsoever yeah in five minutes yeah that's good yeah so yeah that was that was quite humbling.
    31:12
    So I was playing the tournament. I was sitting usually in like around, call it 37th place, right? So I was in the top 50, which is cool. And then we get to the final 24 hours and I go check my status. And all of a sudden I'm at 42 and then at 47. And I'm like, no, what's going on? So I'm frantically trying to figure out what tables I should play that I actually have a chance of improving my score in five minutes, because some tables I'm just terrible at.
    31:44
    I wasn't going to increase my score and it would just be a whole bunch of wasted five-minute periods of me trying. Like Big Shot.
    31:52
    I couldn't figure out for the life of me how to score more in TX sector. There were just tables like that weren't doing it for me. Anyway, I was kind of keeping under probably again, 44th to 48th place, kind of dancing around there. And then within the final 16 hours, all of a sudden I was at 53rd. I was like, oh. And it was really hard for me to... I was like, do I care? Can I let this go? No, because I'm too damn close to being put into that drawing. And it was like, if it wasn't for that drawing, I would have just been like, eh, whatever.
    32:36
    I'd also kick myself if I missed being that close to having a chance at winning. Again, it's a 1 in 50 chance then of the draw for being drawn, which I don't know if they've had the drawing yet. We haven't heard a winner.
    32:51
    Okay. But so I'm sitting there battling, and I got myself at the – when the tournament was supposed to close, I wound up plopping in at 49th place.
    33:06
    49th. Not only that, but it was a three-way tie. 48th and 50th had the exact same score as I did. Oh, boy.
    33:17
    So, yeah, I kind of take pride in always doing that. Like, I know I'll never get the top score, but it's kind of fun being just last place, knowing that you weren't first loser. Getting the wooden spoon. Yeah.
    33:35
    Yeah, exactly. It's amazing how many times with these tournaments that that's exactly me. You know, when it's a matter of going from, say, bronze to silver level, I could care less about getting first place. I just want to make the cutoff. Yeah, exactly. And more often than not, I'm right there at the cutoff.
    33:53
    Yeah. Well, look, good on you for getting into the draw. I hope you pick up a nice little tidy laptop to play on. Dude, that'd be sweet. So sweet. That'd be pretty good ranking rights to show that off on the Blab session. wouldn't it? It would be. That competition, of course, would have only been open to US residents, right? So even if I did have a Steam account, it wouldn't have been down here. That's not correct. Oh, really? It was worldwide? Worldwide. Oh, yeah. Good on them for doing that. Because knowing how difficult it is for, like, you know, lotteries and sweet steaks and stuff like this around the world, that's no mean feat to achieve, to get the right permissions to do that. So that's pretty good. Good on them.
    34:37
    I mean, there never was a claim that you couldn't be a resident of anywhere else. So I'm just, you know, I didn't look at the fine print. You just went, hey, this is a tournament that's being run in my country. I should be able to play this. Exactly. Yeah.
    34:52
    Well, that's pretty cool, man. Yeah. So now that we're, but now we're back to the 20 minute tournaments and I've already started one and I'm already hating it. So I probably won't complete it. Let's probably change the format one month. Just go, you know what? It's a five-minute tourney month, and go fill your boots, because it would throw everyone off completely. Do it across all platforms, too. And actually, yeah. Well, Tarek actually even came onto the forum and said, he goes, this is really weird for me because I'm having to rethink my strategy for how to approach the table. Because he's a very, very conservative player. Whenever you read any of his strategies of getting these insanely high scores, it is about taking only the safest of safe shots, ignoring anything that causes the ball to go wild on you. And it's a boring strategy, but it's what you have to do in order to achieve decent scores. The big points. Yeah. It's all about grinding, right? It's that same shot 200 times or whatever, you know?
    35:57
    You can't do that in a five-minute tournament. So, yeah, that was my experience with the tournament. But you know what, Jared? we've had kind of a string of doing a long podcast, haven't we? Yeah, we have. Yeah. We, we tend to talk a lot about stuff strangely enough. Right. So why don't we have a short one?
    36:16
    Yeah, let's do that. Let's have a short one. All right. So that's it gang. That's we appreciate everybody listening. We would love for you to comment, participate with us. You can hit either one of us up on Twitter at Jared morgues or at shut your traps. Of course, if you want to communicate directly with the show, it's at Blockade. You can also check out our website, BlockadePinball.com, or email us at BlahBlahBlockade at gmail.com.
    36:48
    So, yeah, that's going to do it for us this week. We will be back with more pinball loveliness next week. Join us, if you will. We tend to send out a notification that we're recording on Blab. You can join us. Hop in the comments, post any questions that you want live, and we can make them a part of this very show. Absolutely.
    37:10
    All right. Until then, we will talk again next week, everybody. Thanks for listening. See you later.
    37:17
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    38:03
    There's a website for everything. Some of them will just happen to get you in trouble with the FBI. Gotta live on the edge. You absolutely do. Yeah.
    38:15
    What? What do you got going on there, Sienna? It's a kernel thing. Oh, wow. It's a kernel thing. I'm still recording here, darling. I won't be long.
    38:28
    Oh, dear. Gotta have those moments.