Quoted from iloveplywood:Thanks guys,
Yeah its always happened on non-square or soft hits before but it was relatively rare and pretty obvious that it was the quality of the strike that was the cause. There's definitely been a change in the last 70 games or so (I've put about 1100 on the game) and it's hard to go a game without it happening at least once and I'm at the point where my urge to play has dropped drastically because of it. The game was definitely hard enough for me before this started happening, so I'll do some more testing and maybe look at the mechanism or maybe god forbid the flipper power.
Thanks again for the help, I'll report back if I find anything out for future reference.
That's too bad that it's keeping you from playing it more. To me, it's part of the mechanical nature of pinball. Things vary and it's not pre-programmed to drop like a video game might be when you've hit the "hit box."