This is more like Dad and Partner. You know, Quisp & Quake?

Good luck American Pinball!

What a useful resource on these forums that customers just tell what they want.

To that end here is what I would like:
(1) A fun game
(2) More of a challenging playfield that another basic fan layout that I can already play already with other tables
(3) Humor in callouts, and variety
(4) The logical stuff already built in, to acknowledge opportunity cost of a home user to add playfield plastic protectors, artblades, etc
(5) Not to have NIB price chopped in half in a year because game sucks, broken, or abandoned
(6) Commitment to replaceable parts
(7) Safe hardware hooks to allow for mods
(8) Proper shipping materials. So far I like Spooky’s off-the-shelf moving blankets best
(9) Engagement with owners about what they want fixed/changed. Bug at spooky livestreams with owners to collaboratively make final Evil Dead Wizard, David at BoF has a whiteboard for factory visitors to write the dream themes he wants him to chase
(10) A playfield and art package that looks good
(11) No spyware/mandatory subscriptions

I listened to the entire FlipNOut podcast the other day and liked what I heard so far. Looking forward to seeing what next AP games will be

Thank you. This all makes sense and great suggestions and I have forwarded to the team. Shadow Avatar is awesome!

The Shadow Knows (resized).png

See, this is exactly what I was talking about.

You are seriously going to forward this unedited laundry list of nonsense to your team and tell them to take it seriously?

What is your team going to think of suggestions like "make a fun game," "include hooks for mods," "don't make a game that sucks," and "make games with good art?"

Gee! Why didn't we think of any of this ?!

Most welcome Bryan! It is interesting that so many of the features in my wishlist are in a Shadow already. What a great machine.

Hey on your rotisserie Shadow restore, if you don't have one already, you may wish to consider the Aurich translite if you can find one. I have it here on my Shadow and it really improves the machine

I hope that this "team" is a bunch of complete outsiders who also just started. Otherwise, if I'm an employee at American Pinball, I've just learned this week that I have a brand new boss, I've heard his business plan from a podcast, and I'm now getting emails from him that are copy pasted from pinside forum posts, a forum that I'd undoubtedly be watching like a hawk to gather information about the new boss I met 3 days prior.

During my day to day in my 8 years in pinball I've come across many internal suggestion lists. Josh probably sends me 5 new suggestions every workday. However, none of them start with the insulting directive to make "a fun game" Wow... why didn't we think of that!?!

3 Shadow pinball fans posting in a row! That has to rack up some kinda points just for the combo

All I go to say is get ahold of that Friday the 13th homebrew and make it! That is a huge license and anything Jason Voorhees/Fri the 13th sells!

Jesus Christ man give it a rest, are you deadset on hitting 40k posts in this thread? Shut up

But....he has a point, doesn't he?

For once I actually think you could benefit from taking it down a notch and that is coming from one of the biggest assholes here on Pinside.

I am thinking that maybe there was enough common sense that not all suggestions were forwarded?

Im sure bryan read his same point the other hundred times he posted, if he ran AP it'd "be tits up in a week."

I'm sure Bryan is being respectful of honestly given feedback and will take what he can out of it. I do think he should ignore other "unedited" advice like "ignore your customers!" but I am not going to speculate on his reaction as I am pretty sure he doesn't need my suggestion or yours on how to run a successful business and how to make sound business decisions.

I will state I would like AP AND the other manufacturers to succeed, keeping our hobby fresh and relevant. Don't you? (I think you do, I hope you do)

Wow! Three way combo!

Your list was well stated. It was a mix of obvious things (be fun!) and less obvious things (consider adding better official mod support), but sometimes even the obvious is good to keep in mind, especially when you're making products directly for customers.

There are definitely times I've played a pin and not felt that anyone on the team remembered that it should be fun.

The thing about all the backseat driver comments you're getting about your list is they're basically saying, in one way or another, "I think this Bryan guy is an idiot".

Let's assume for a minute that Bryan is in fact not a moron. And that when he responds positively to people contributing, and welcomes feedback, and says he's going to forward on suggestions that he doesn't just copy and paste posts into an email and hit send.

Honestly if someone couldn't look at that list you wrote, and figure out a way to use it in a positive manner with their team, then they're frankly way out of their depth to be telling anyone how to run a company.

But more than that, responding positively to people who take the time to put out positive energy is just a simply good community management strategy. As is ignoring the people who continue on being a broken record in ways that aren't useful.

If you posted that list in the Ars Technica forum in a place we asked for feedback and I said "thanks, I'm forwarding on to the team" I can tell you what I would probably do.

I'd drop a link to the post in the #management channel of our Slack, and highlight something I liked about it.

"This was a nice post, I like the idea of safe hooks for mods. We've talked about official accessories, but building a good rapport with the aftermarket mod community would be a smart way to keep people engaged with our game, and providing extra value and excitement for people who are looking for things we probably don't have the bandwidth or scale to provide. Also, not having fucking alligator clips under our playfields is going to lead to less reliability headaches from people causing their own problems that still will reflect back on us. Let's make sure we think about adding a few 5V molex connectors under the playfield."

Boom, done. Not hard. I do exactly that all the time. We regularly look to the community for basic temperature checks. And, we don't use them as some proxy for democracy—if a bunch of people post a dumb idea we ignore it. It's just another tool in the chest.

I guess Bryan should have responded with a hearty "f u". Would that have made you happy? SMH, you truly are a curmudgeon.

I, for one, will welcome any halving of prices of NIB pins - even the ones I own. I LOVE the fact that GTF and LOV have been screaming NIB values over the last few months.

You guys are so happy to have a rich guy taking your half baked suggestions seriously you've lost all sense of perspective. And he did ask for feedback.

And aurich clearly sent in a resume and is sucking up for a job, where he'll be forwarded such helpful directives as "make good art."

Hey just 35 more posts to go!