What's the ideal way to produce/market a responsive yoyo?

General Yo-Yo
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This is just something I’ve had on the mind pretty often since I’ve been playing almost exclusively fixed axle yoyos for February. I almost hated playing fixies at first because I just couldn’t wrap my head around how to get them to consistently respond well. And every time I see a responsive yoyo get released now, there’s always vocal groups of people who are just unhappy with the response on it. I’m mildly curious on how other people feel responsive yoyos should come stock, and how they should be sold and marketed.

Nobody wants to buy a yoyo with an impression of it in their head, and end up very dissatisfied once they get it and it plays nothing like how they had it described to them. And it seems like this happens very frequently with responsives. Mostly because of people being unhappy with it not responding how they want it to out of the box. So the discussion here is just what’s the best solution to this?

With unresponsive yoyos, a lot of them aimed at newer players will have explicit disclaimers that they require a bind return. As if binding is a more complicated technique that will prevent somebody from using the yoyo. I personally think this is a bit backwards and binds are mostly straightforward. Sometimes people will get a yoyo with an exceptionally wide gap or pads that they have to break in, but the response on the majority of modern unresponsive yoyos is good out of the box. With modern responsive yoyos, most of them require fairly regular maintenance in addition to just having that baseline level of knowledge on how to perform said maintenance.

Responsive yoyos have more factors in response than just gap width, pads, and string thickness/material. Starting with lube, it’s more complicated than it seems at a glance. Types of lube can vary so greatly, and I don’t know how obvious that would be to somebody buying lube for the first time. Whether it’s thick or thin yoyo lube, or actual silicone grease or another thick substance. Beyond lube the difference between responsive yoyo pads is pretty massive. And then there’s both bearing size, and how recessed the bearing seats are on the yoyo itself. A full spec C bearing responsive yoyo might seem bad to some people at a glance, but it can end up being good depending on the bearing seat. The deep state is a good example of this. Beyond maintenance I’ve seen plenty of people ignorant on how string tension will affect response, so that’s just another factor to consider.

There’s a lot more to unpack here than just “Do I get tight binds and avoid snags by using this string thickness.”

Yoyofactory I think tried to directly address this issue by using their thick response pads. These eliminate almost all of the nuance listed above to just provide a consistent snappy return that will last with basically no maintenance. I haven’t seen a single person complain that a Confusion out of the box didn’t respond well enough. I’ve tried a couple yoyos with these thick pads though and I think they’re practically unplayable for doing anything more than the most basic tricks. The response just way to aggressive and they snag constantly and severely hinder the performance of an otherwise good yoyo.

But I think I’d lean towards saying thick pads might be a better solution. Because if you’re somebody picky enough to care about your response more than just wanting it to come back instantly with a tug, you probably already know what maintenance to perform. I can just swap pads in it and put my own grease in the bearing and suddenly I’m happy with the yoyo.

Others have argued for using more non standard bearing sizes to achieve smaller gap widths which is an interesting idea. The RBC maybe inadvertently tried to tackle this dilemma with this method. It used a tiny bearing with the idea that it would both give an ideal gap size and not require regular lubing. I thought it worked extremely well out of the box, although some people said it was acting very unresponsive until they put some lube on the bearing. I think the RBC achieved the best response out of any modern responsive yoyo using this method, but to an absolute beginner I’m still inclined to say using those massive thick pads is better.

You could make the argument that the RBC went the better route. Because somebody who doesn’t know how to do bearing maintenance shouldn’t be buying an 85 dollar yoyo. But even while making that argument, it won’t prevent somebody from potentially buying it and being unhappy with it when they can’t figure out how to get it to respond.

All I think I can say definitively is that yoyos with half spec bearings and regular slim 19mm pads being marketed as semi-responsives is an awful idea. I’ve seen so much hate from beginners for some of my favorite yoyos because they didn’t know how to lube their bearing or change their string. And they just blamed the yoyo being bad as for why it didn’t have a snappy tug response. Nobody wants to feel like they have a bad yoyo, especially when it’s just user error creating that feeling.

So yeah, kind of a long winded and rambling post, but I’m curious what other people think the ideal way to set up and market a stock responsive yoyo is. If there’s an ideal setup, or if the solution would be as simple as having a disclaimer stating “Yoyo response is complicated, this yoyo was extensively tested and designed to respond well, but it requires a bit of regular maintenance.”

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If you can tug it back to your hand, it’s responsive, right? Yoyos all play differently. It’s part of the journey to try them to find what you like or build a bond with something unfamiliar. It’s a saving grace that you can tamper with them all easily, too. I haven’t tried a yoyo that was billed as responsive that I had to bind, so I’m sceptical of that actually being a thing other than a mind trick. I don’t think maintenance is much of a mystery to people, either. They’ll be curious and figure it out.

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Looking at the reception of the Bumble Bee, Gamer, El MiJo, and RBC should all be enough of an example that people have very different expectations for what they’re getting when they receive a responsive yoyo. If you look at reviews of stuff like the Sherpa (pictured) or Butterfly AL you’ll see comments of “This doesn’t respond at all, terrible yoyo.”

Sure it’s user error, but I feel like if somebody is just getting into yoyo it’s pretty understandable what they’re confused about. I think this review really is a good example that there’s definitely something to at least discuss here.

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Well- the new bimetal bumblebee from Duncan is marketed as being fully responsive when you add the friction stickers. Turned out not to be the case…still needed a bind.

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I think a lot of the issues are that either people don’t read specs or don’t understand what they’re looking for in those specs. They’ll see a certain shape and bearing size and automatically assume it will be good for one thing or another which isn’t always true.

I have a lot of responsive yoyos and even the most highly praised ones and my personal favorites needed grease. Whether that grease was out on by the manufacturer or by myself upon arrival. You want snappy response, you need grease. And then you need more grease as time goes on.

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Also, it’s up to the consumer to do their own research and weigh options based on their wants and needs. Watch/read reviews, read descriptions, read specs

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It’s pretty interesting honestly, I don’t think there is an ideal way. Some people love the responsiveness of the Confusion, where you could loop with it if you wanted to. Meanwhile, at least in my experience, the Deep State was a very different type of responsive yoyo, and some people love that as well. It’s pretty hard to describe the difference but for people who have played both they’ll understand. Look at the Spencer Berry Walter, one of the most coveted responsive designs, I’m sure if it were in mass production, some people would have gripes about it as well.

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I wouldn’t know. I haven’t played it. I can see where the expectation comes from, but I don’t have the experience.

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Hmm. Maybe it’s just confusion about what responsive means. I feel like people think it means the yoyos that basically wind automatically. You drop them, and they don’t sleep, or they auto return, like the brain? Which is not encompassing to me. Responsive is when you can tug them and make them come back to your hand, right? That’s not rhetorical. I mean, I’ve been disappointed in what I’ve gotten before but not because I didn’t get what I ordered.

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No, I would assume most people are just talking about the definition of responsive as you just said it- a yoyo that you can throw a nice sleeper with, then gives you a solid tug response.

I’m frustrated with the new bumblebee becuase they said in their marketing that with the friction stickers it is “fully responsive”. That’s a load of bull. Maybe after applying a teaspoon of grease to it you could make the claim lol.

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I don’t think it’s confusion, I’m pretty sure their yoyo just actually wouldn’t return at all with a tug. The Sherpa was an old yoyo when they bought it and it really needed some fresh lube.

If that buyer did more research, they probably would’ve learned that they needed to buy lube for it. But their point still remains that nowhere on the store page did it say that. They expected a tug response out of the box. On every bearing responsive I’ve played other than the RBC though, I’ve had to lube up the bearing pretty much immediately. But I don’t think I’ve seen a single responsive yoyo other than loopers that said “Hey, if you want this to keep playing well, go out and buy a tube of silicone grease.”

With the complaint about the Bumble Bee too, it doesn’t mention needing grease on the store page. But having plenty of experience with bearing responsives, grease being a requirement just the nature of them.

Less maintenance for long term consistent response is why I heavily prefer playing fixies over modern bearing responsive yoyos for what it’s worth.

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Honest answer, I’ve tried tons of these new metal modern responsives and only 3 gave me the response out if the box that I was expecting.

The Weekender, RBC and Daytripper.

If companies would label their yoyos as tug responsive out if the box, semi responsive or unresponsive, that would help. If it can be made responsive by swapping in and included bearing, say that. Everyone knows if you lube the heck out of a yoyo it’ll make it responsive so leave that out. If their are two sets of pads and one makes it responsive, say that, just like yoyofactory did in the Confusion (had Duncan done proper testing on the bumblebee we likely wouldn’t be having this discussion)

Good topic to discuss

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So I think there are 2 aspects of this conversation; managing customer expectations and yoyo design.

Modern responsive yoyos (defined as the current generation of bearing responsives designed for responsive play) can fall into two camps in my opinion. The first would be yoyos trying to emulate classic 90’s responsive play, which was more responsive 1A style play, the second would be yoyos trying to emulate the play feel of classic fixed axle yoyos that are largely intended for 0A style play. The differences between the two are subtle, and its hare to convey via photos, specs, and marketing which camp a yoyo is intended for. Often times the yoyos don’t clearly inform the customer as to what style play they are intended for. There are some standouts in this regard. The other aspect of managing customer expectations is information on maintanence. Responsive yoyos in both camps require more maintanence than their unresponsive counterparts. Lube, grease, response pad life, string choice are all very important and its not immediately apparent that those things need to be paid attention to by the user. Users of this forum, and people who regularly watch content from people like Ed Haponik, DocPop, Kyle Nations, etc might have the knowledge but those people are a small portion of people who actually play with or buy yoyos.

The second part of this conversation is yoyo design, something that seems to be brushed off in the original post. I think thats absolutely the most crucial part of this. Gap width, bearing diameter, response pad size, and string choice are basiclly what make or break the response system. If those things aren’t correct, the yoyo will be disappointing, regardless of how its marketed. Just look at the recent Bumble Bee release, it didn’t fail in marketing or managing expectations (they literally included extra pads to play with response). it failed clearly in design, and it mostly all comes down to gap width/response pad selection. The RBC, Day Tripper, and Weekender are a few examples of a yoyos that got it right from the design phase.

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I don’t think the Bumble Bee failed at all or had a design issue inherently though. The complaints I’ve seen about it have mostly just been from people unaware of how important lubing the bearing is for a strong tug response. But when the yoyo shipped with just slim pads in it and had a wider gap, it just made sense that it would excel at doing 1A tricks but with responsive dismounts. If anything I’d say that if there was a failure it was on the marketing end for being a bit vague and people bought it having very different expectations.

@kretzschmar might have a really good point in that yoyos should just be stated better what their response will actually be like. Things are really just described as responsive. But how responsive they are is definitely a big scale that determines how they play. I’ll say though the Bumble Bee stuff shows that not everybody knows the important of greasing up a bearing for responsive play.

Back to your point though, where you might say the Bumble Bee failed because it wasn’t responsive enough out of the box. That’s calling it a bad design based on one merit. Instead of asking if the design is good or bad based on what it excels at. We all know that high walled/center weighted yoyos will be bad at horizontal. But it’s a bit harder with responsives to tell at a glance what the design intent is. Will it be for stall play? Looping? 1A tricks that end with classic responsive dismounts? For throwing 1A tricks on a responsive yoyo I don’t think the Bumble Bee failed at all.

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When the first sentence of the marketing statement mentions forward pass, and you can’t do that out of the box, even with the accessories included I consider that a failure.

Its incredibly rare that you find a yoyos marketing claim its great a horizontal, and to be frank it a yoyo made that claim and it was unstable during basic horizontal I’d call that a failure too.

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That’s fair. In my head I’m still just processing that as user error, but that’s kind of the point of the thread though. Should yoyos be released or marketed in a state where user error to an extreme like this can even happen?

That’s probably the strongest argument for why the thick yoyofactory pads are a good solution. Maybe with responsives it’s just going to be better to start off with a way too aggressive responsive, and then work your way down to where you want it. The RBC I think also kind of succeeded in doing this in a slightly different way, start with the yoyo in it’s most aggressively responding state and then you can tone it down as much as you personally want.

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Another variable that comes to response, is also string length. Longer strings will play a lot looser and will respond slower than shorter stings. If you are a taller adult the belly button reference point might just be too long for certain models and designs. I’ve had Yomega Fireballs even play unresponsive out of the package, requiring double looping on the axle as recommended on the package, thick lubing of the plastic transaxle bearing axle and adding Tom Kuhn Turbo Disc over the starburst. Also cotton strings or Slick 50/50s will help add to a more responsive feel, compared to poly and nylon strings.

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I think this paragraph puts a very interesting frame around your perspective. For the vast majority of the history of the yoyo, and in the average person’s lived experience, a yoyo is a toy you throw to spin and it either comes back (gravity pull or forward pass) or it sleeps and then comes back. Metal bearings have only been widely used for a little over 20 years, and unresponsive has been an even newer development. Generationally, we have barely gotten to the point that people who grew up only playing unresponsive might start having kids that they teach. Almost all other adults are likely to “know” that a yoyo works the way a “responsive” yoyo works.

So, if someone is selling a yoyo to the general public in a general marketplace, if they don’t specify and explain what “unresponsive” means, the recipients (or the children the people are buying them for) are going to expect a traditional, responsive design and the feedback/reviews are going to be really negative).

On sites like YYE, my sense is that the listings that warn about unresponsive yoyos tend to be for older models that were released during the dawn of the “unresponsive era” when the expectation had not been set that “good” yoyos should be unresponsive and it helped manage expectations.

I also think you are underestimating how easy it is to bind for a beginner. Given that a lot of beginners are young kids without any prior yoyo experience, they don’t yet know how to throw a “good strong sleeper”, which is the basis for pretty much everything else. It’s very common for someone just learning to have the yoyo be off plane and die before they can get it to return because the throw was weak to begin with. If you’re going to add to that the requirement that they learn how to land the yoyo on the string and bind, they are going to have a lot more failed attempts than if it were tug responsive and they’re going to be a lot more manual winding (because they don’t know about and/or haven’t mastered snap starts and many of the other quick wind tricks work better on a responsive design).

For the question of “how responsive is responsive”, I think of it as a continuum between string tied to the axle and can’t sleep on the left side over to “unresponsive” on the right side. But the thing is, once you get past the point of “unresponsive”, you can do things that make the yoyo “less responsive” while still being able to bind just fine. That is to say, there is a range of response setups that will all yield an unresponsive yoyo, since the definition of “unresponsive” is “a yoyo that does not return with a tug”.

However, “responsive” really describes a range of behaviors that we don’t have good ways to quantify. How fast does it need to be spinning? What kind of string are you using? What thickness of string are you using? What kind of bearing? etc. Different configurations here will lead to different results and different people have different expectations. And yes, most bearing responsives require some type of maintenance, this also clashes against the old school expectations where all string was cotton and most response systems were starburts.

Now, with bearings and response pads and string options, we have a lot more control over how a yoyo is going to respond, but it becomes incumbent on us to configure and maintain that response as needed. Historically, yoyos just needed a replacement string every once in a while and sometimes a tool to get out a knot. Things are just more complex now and most things aren’t automatic by default anymore.

And then there are the characteristics that impact responsiveness, some of which are by design and some of them are decided by the user:

  • Material(s)
  • Weight
  • Weight distribution
  • Width
  • Diameter
  • Gap Width
  • Wall height
  • Bearing size
  • Bearing type
  • Bearing sealing or shielding
  • String type
  • String thickness
  • String length
  • How many times the string is wrapped around the axle
  • Response material
  • Response width
  • Response thickness relative to the gap width
  • Player throw strength
  • Player throw accuracy
  • Lube type
  • Lube quantity
  • Lube location/distribution
  • Other stuff (?)

I agree with your general comment that 19mm response pads with a half spec bearing doesn’t always lend itself to good responsive yoyo experience. 19mm was designed for unresponsive and they usually are even with the gap or slightly recessed. So swapping in a half spec for a full sized bearing is just altering the gap width and the bearing/lube attributes which may or may not be enough to achieve the desired results and may require more effort (lube) on the part of the user that they weren’t expecting.

My personal preference is for small bearing responsives that often have thicker, wider pads. Even here, though, there are things to check and tweak, like lube. There are some full C bearing yoyos that can play fine responsively and others that play fine with a half spec.

Response has been something that was always tinkered with in the era of bearings and stickers, and it continues to be an area of configuration. The Moonshine 2 shipped with one slim pad and one thick pad (compared to the Confusion which shipped with two thick pads, the Sherpa that came with 19mm pads, and the Moonshine had broader, thicker pads [snow tires?]). So, out of the box, these four yoyos from the same company(s) all had very different options for playing responsive with some tweakable elements and some not as tweakable elements, and that’s before you put the string on.

Given that different people are going to have different opinions about what constitutes “good response”, it’s not surprising that different people have different opinions about the same releases, particularly if they are dead set on getting any “responsive” yoyo to perform well in a specific way. e.g. I have to be able to easily shoot the moon or it’s not responsive enough. I don’t fault people for having that preference, but I personally like to meet a yoyo where it’s coming from and tweak from there to figure out what tricks and play styles work well with it.

So, after a bit of a ramble, the best way to produce/market a responsive yoyo is probably to:

  1. Make plastic Imperials and Butterflies with starburst response and cotton string
  2. Be Duncan

This will meet the expectations of the vast majority of non-throwers and have the widest possible market. For modern responsive it gets a whole lot trickier on the design and maintenance fronts and people are going to have to feel their way around until they find what works for them. At this point, I think there is a ton of unexplored space in “modern responsive” design and we are working through the communal knowledge of how to best maintain these things when we have discussions like this. Most modern responsive bearing yoyos aren’t going to offer a perfect play experience for everyone out of the box, but that seems like more of a feature than a bug to me.

P.S. in the early days of bearing axle yoyos, people messed around with response systems all the time trying to get the response just where they wanted it. I’ve read about people who would slap a “dead” Duncan friction sticker in a different yoyo to make it just a little more responsive, or having a preference for mismatched wear on the friction stickers, or just playing with one in and not both, etc.

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You totally ninja’d me in the best way possible with this reply. I’ve been playing regularly for the past 3 years (not counting a very short experience as a kid with a Yomega Brain), and there have been times when I’ve thought “Do I need to practice my Gravity Pull?” because I just couldn’t get a consistent response out of a responsive yoyo. There’s so much precision gained from simply trying to do something over and over again that seems to be impossible to describe or teach. I got El MiJo last month and loved the response with both the blank and the half spec bearing. But when I came back to play with it after not playing with it for a week or two, the response with either axle was completely inconsistent. I would do a snap start, and I could see the string wrapped up in the gap as it was falling down, but it would fall straight to the bottom of the string with no spin. Eventually I found a string that made it more consistent, but even after a handful of days consistently playing with the bearing blank, it still doesn’t always respond the way I expect it to.

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Additional evidence that tweaking isn’t really a new problem/feature, several years ago, when I got back into throwing, I bought a used Tom Kuhn Roller Woody. It slept great, but it would only respond on the first throw. After that first response, the string wouldn’t stay wound tightly enough to actually throw it again. By design, these had an adjustable gap, so I fiddled with that an it made no difference at all. I think I also tried a different string (but I didn’t have as many options at my disposal at the time).

I took it to the next yoyo meetup and asked the wise guru who ran the group and had been in the community a long time to see if he could tell me what I should do. He picked up the yoyo, slipped the string on his finger, threw it down, and brought it back up. Then he threw it down again and it was dead at the end of the string. He looked at the gap adjustment to confirm it was narrow, then he asked if I had considered putting a Duncan Friction Sticker on one side. I had not, as this seemed like an unintended use case. This yoyo wasn’t designed for response stickers! When I got home, I put one on it anyway, and it responded great after that.

That was the day that I realized it was up to each individual to find their own balance point with yoyo configuration and there weren’t really any limits until you tried something and found out it didn’t work (or broke something).