It's mostly a problem of information (or lack of it). The few stats you lose from it aren't going to make a difference in the grand scheme of things as long as you explore a little, do sidequests, and find things around the castle, but the player is never made aware of this fact. The design philosophy was to have a mini game that's challenging for those that absolutely want to minmax, but I realised that even with this in mind it's still pretty overtuned and frustrating, so I fixed the first one. Left the second one as is as a sort of joke, but now that the game is gaining traction and there are a lot of people telling me it's painfully annoying, I'll get around to fixing it as well, and moving forward, any future ball games of that level will be optional sidequests
And dw, that was one of the nicer posts in terms of pointing out how annoying the ball game is!