I Agree with you 1000% neighbor! It’s stupid reasoning that doesn’t make sense.

I’m confident they will find a way to appease the home market in time as well. George is open to feedback on both sides and will adjust. Great listen - that guy knows what he’s doing and bluntly honest about missteps.

I totally agree with this. As much as I hate to admit it I would be willing to pay some small one-time fee to unlock the home leaderboard functionality if that’s what it took for Stern to allow it

For home users, It should be included in that yearly subscription for the insider pro account or whatever it is called.

Insider Connected is currently no way worth the price tag. I bought it based on thinking the updates would give me further reasons to play, but the updates are slow as molasses. I'm not even sure they'll ever make it actually worth it over time.

Yup, I'm really disappointed with this. My family was very much looking forward to it. Would have been so cool to have during holidays and parties.

Don't they have the technology to figure out cheaters? I think they do with timing detection on the pf. There should be a separate home leader boards and achievements leaderboard at home. I think majority of ic are home users. Would love to it, something like today's high scores, etc.

Would any amount of timing logic help if someone blocked their drains?

I would love to have a leaderboard for the Christmas Holidays set up for family members coming over on. Come on Stern make it so

Right, I don't care if anyone outside my house sees my scores. I just want to have a cool looking 24 inch TV set up on the wall next to my machines for myself and relatives/friends showing that days scores. Ah well. Hopefully like what was said already they reconsider at some point.

Cheating happens on every leaderboard for every videogame. It's a silly reason not to have it since you are basically saying you can't be bothered to police it.

I personally don't view home leaderboards as a huge feature for homes, I mean it would be nice, we could all exchange ids and have a pinside leaderboard among other things.

They need way more than just that to impress me.

Same for me, the holidays are so fun when you see everyone playing. But with no way to hook them in with leaderbaords. Heck I have more invested in pin then most locations.

yes Yes YES

Well at home I control it by having the key. Me and my Family compete in leagues and all our pins are set to the hardest level and 3 balls. Stern only has top 5 in the menus to see not the larger list for everyone to see.

I just assumed this would be available so I could do a home leaderboard for my kids and their friends. I was going to buy more IC games to make it more fun. If they aren't going to make it available it really reduces my desire to buy more. I will just buy games that support Scorbit.

I am almost in the same boat. I heard it was coming and bought a IC kit for each game then.......... NOPE Least we are getting all the NON-Verified badges

Just posted in the insider connected thread about the $39.99 I paid for ‘goldenbeards gameroom’ why the hell did I spend that money the , to make my machines available so I can get stupid achievements? What a joke.

What’s the easiest way to create a business account? And how much? Everything is through my business anyways. This is really a bummer

iscored is great option for home leader boards.

https://iScored.info

Started an update on my 500 mbps Wi-Fi and saw it was going to take an eternity. It already takes forever through the website and my computer. Unless I’m doing something wrong. And I don’t think I am.

I’m blindly typing these two posts while reading comments. I’m legitimately pissed right now. I have these stupid IC kits I’m getting ready to install and have been telling everyone for months we’re doing a leaderboard for the holidays. This sucks

Going to check this out. I’ve already got some template ideas for other leaderboards I wanted to cycle through on the screen for arcade games and pool.

I was going to set one screen up for live-streaming and the other screen up for leaderboards

Just don’t let people on the ‘master’ leaderboards. Just let us have one for our own game rooms. Once again, not sure why i paid $39.99 or what I even got with it.

Is there a way to see global leaderboards for high scores and achievments?

A few things. There are no global leaderboards to see how you're doing. As noted there is a two week run on one game for both verified and non-verified but it cuts off at 100 people. I really like the idea of just put all game on there and reset maybe very quarter, if not only the billions will survive.

I mentioned it before and pinball on Xbox has it, let user make virtual boards that you can join and compete with.

I think it's only a matter of time to sync the Stern Spike 2 Linux system output (have not sniffed the data packets yet) in a new stream and make a whole reward system.

This is such a dumb decision. Having home leaderboards will in no way affect location play. I was looking forward to displaying high scores and having friends and family compete during gatherings. Definitely a case of seeing the forest for the trees.

Grinch Gomez has stolen Christmas!

Honestly, locations need something only available to locations, it’s already hard enough to make any money operating pins. With that said, it would be cool if a separate, limited network for home style leaderboards were available without taking away any advantage of location leaderboards.

If your collection is accurate, then you need to visit better locations. There are locations out there that have a single pin worth more than your entire collection. Glad you are one of the enthusiastic new guys here though. Support your local operators, sounds like they need help.

*this is not a dig at you

Maybe the biggest impact we can do is to cancel insider connect yearly membership?

Why is that? Ops haven’t installed/registered IC?

Not smart from Stern.

Most games sold go into a home environment. Home environments can run comps with their collections.

Make the leaderboards non verified.

Give people some value and a good reason to buying IC kits for all their games.

I'd be surprised if there's any actual operators who truly care if leaderboards are available at home. If there are operators who feel that way, they're imbeciles.

If anything, if more folks get exposed to leaderboards at home they will be MORE likely to seek out locations with them for bragging rights. I'm seldom willing to underestimate the human capacity for stupidity, but operators clamoring for stern to make leaderboards location only just seems too farfetched for me.

As an aside, home leaderboards would be a great way to beta test new features before releasing them to more "serious" location environs.

I think that’s all most people want. Just make it an unofficial localized (as in only that gameroom) leaderboard.

100% agree, this is a "bad" business decision from Stern. Their mistake is listening to operators who are just consumers like us and not realizing the intangibles like this are very detrimental... bad press, bad word of mouth. Marketing 101, Sales 101. Just because someone is good at designing and project managing a pinball machine doesn't mean they should oversee key business decisions.

It is 100% avoidable, but so far they have chosen NOT to avoid it. They have chosen to build a class system for their consumers. The elite "haves" and lowly undeserving "have-nots". If only us too, the home consumers who spend the exact same goddamn dollars and pennies for these machines ran a business from the hobby? I think Stern is being naive here and not malicious.

"The road to hell was always paved with good intentions" afterall.

Stern likely thinks that treating the operator community as a channel sales, and an extension of their business model means that locking out all other consumers is a solid business transaction. This is CERTAINLY a result of a handful of noisy operators who carry some weight for some reason internally within the manufacturer community. This is a mistake on Stern's part, THEY HOLD THE POWER AS THE MANUFACTURER. I would assume this was a 30 minute discussion at most at Stern HQ without any consideration of the real ramifications that it would bring.

The good news is, its a software switch that Stern can turn on at ANY point in time and clear their name. If they want to find a happy medium, put the goddamn feature behind the Insider Connected Pro subscription and charge people for the feature. Monetize it, operationalize the revenue and build your pipeline. I swear the people making these decisions are blind and have little sales experience. Stop listening to whiny operators.

Treat your customers equally. Shocking advise, I'm sure heads are rolling at Stern right now reading this.

I haven't owned a NIB Stern since my Star Trek Prem, so I'm behind the times on the IC stuff, but looking at their website I'm not actually clear why you pay them?

Doesn't seem like you get much of anything really.

Half of our spike 2 games DO NOT have IC on them. Unless they have come with the newer games and yes, we have a leaderboard or two up.

Why? Operators get no discount on the kit. $200 per machine adds up quick and you would be disgustingly shocked by how little money a 7-9k pinball machine actually makes in a month.

All
They have to do is what they have already done with achievements. Just distinguish home records from location or keep the leaderboards separate.

I don't mind paying for content. I work in journalism ffs.

But it seems to me that the 'content' you're paying for is just marketing material. They're a pinball company, stuff about them making games sounds interesting and all, but it's all in the service of selling the games they make, no?

Anyways, I basically agree with this thread. Differentiating between operators and home buyers who are purchasing the exact same commercial machines for the exact same price feels weak.

In its current state, I see no value in the IC for the home market. I will not install it on any of my games, and currently do not use it on the games that have it. Great idea that has been poorly implemented and knee capped by poor choices.

Stern wants to be a lifestyle brand.

Decisions like this are not the way to achieve that goal.

This whole decision is simply because Stern wants to charge Ops on some sort of plan, and get a cut from every game on IC out on location. The financial gain from that will be bigger than any Insider Plus, or home customer income they can generate.
This has always been the plan, don’t think for a minute that Stern was creating this team of people and platform just to be nice to the players and home buyers, for no charge.
It needs to be free, and have as many players using it as possible, so those players will lean on the Ops to keep it when Stern starts charging commercial Ops for it.
Still a bad move, but very easy to see the logic. This is not some huge blunder that many think, it’s very calculated, from the info they have been gathering from the Pro accounts.