Something along the lines of THIS "Logic Level Converter" is usually what I'd reach for to get the 3.3v GPIO pins to work with 5v things like this.
Thanks for the feedback guys, I have a few of these showing up tomorrow ( https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00XW2L39K/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1 ) and I'm hoping they'll fix this wiring issue so I can continue building out the electrical boxes.
I did, however, purchase on Sunday and receive these two components but I'm guessing they're not as quick\not the same application as the 74HCT245 mentioned. I just want to run them by you and see if maybe I'm using them incorrectly and they may, in-fact work for my application: ( https://www.adafruit.com/product/757 ) and these ( https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B06XWVZHZJ/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o03_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1 )
I do not have any twisted pair wire on hand- that was my first thought before heading down this level shifter route. I'm going ton try and run the 18/3 I have currently, with the correct shifter and if I'm still running into problems then I'll swap out the wire (its already terminated in the waterproof boxes.)
Thanks again for all your guys help, hopefully there aren't more phantom bugs as I move forward with the other components down the line.
Here's Just a bit of info on the games: there are (3) in total, battery powered by (2) 37ah batteries run in series up to 24v. The 24v is used to power a pair of infrared light grids. The native 24v is then step-down to 5v and distributed to the (2) sets of LED on the face as well as power the ESP. One set of lights are a 3 meter strip of faux neon (ws2812s) and the second set are 3 watt pucks from Ray Wu ( as seen in one of my previous videos (ws2811's).) The light grid signal is then ran into a DROK delay relay to dumb down the output back to into the ESP and allow to signal to stay high for a little over a second to eliminate and physical bounce (from ball ricochet) and electrical bounce from the break beams. blah blah, the games all speak to each other over ESPNow and then record their final scores over wifi utilizing JSON packets to the back end database.
So, as you can see, I'm hoping these shifters will fix the random color\flicker so I can then finish the rest of this spiderweb of a mess I've gotten myself into ;-)