“Take responsibility for your drains” 
If I was paying attention I would have SLAMMED the plunger lane as hard as I could to give the ball some sort of different trajectory. I can beat an autoplunge 9 times out of 10 if I’m willing to just slam it without worrying about trying to dial in some sort of ‘skill shot’ precise plunge.
OP wasn’t asking for advice on how to not get drained by the plunge, only venting that it is bad design. Which it is.
Having casual players put a dollar into a machine and watch it bleed out on autoplunges is terrible for the hobby. Even if it only happens on 25% of the machines…that’s tens of thousands of really bad pinball experiences.
I’ve seen this happen a lot on Aerosmiths where full/auto plunge or right orbit shots scream through the pops for center drains. Casuals wonder why the hell they just spent a dollar for nothing.
I really like SW. I know I’m in the minority. Out of 100s of games I’ve only been screwed by the auto plunge a handful of times. I’ve played at least 5 or 6 different examples.
I would’ve NEVER picked this during circuit finals, lol. This was the toughest game there that day. One of the reasons people kept picking Batman because it was a safe plunge and ball time was a little bit longer. Imo Star Wars was the biggest coin flip game there.
I too haven’t found it to be a big problem, although I’m only playing location and home games not setup for competition. The other consideration is just how valuable the skill shots are. If I’m sitting at 2B and the 5% of your score option is available, that’s huge. Another huge one is when you get hold bonus the previous ball and get the 3x bonus multiplier. I had something like 330M bonus carry over the other day and the 3x bonus gave me essentially a 650M skill shot. I’ll take that risk every time.
Whether they’re doing in consciously or not, it sure seems like Stern is designing less and less for casual players these days. Both in playfield design and rules. In the ‘old days’, you could shoot Doc Ock or Sparky a few times and get yourself a MB. On games like GB and SW, I sometimes play a game and don’t start a single MB. The odd thing is I don’t really mind. I like the harder layouts and rules. I’m not sure it’s good for the overall hobby, but I like it. If more games are going in homes these days, it makes sense for them to cater to that audience.
Finally a game that might actually earn some money 
This is my biggest beef about this game. When your ball save DRAINS even before the prior ball save animation shows up… because the game re-launches the ball and drains AGAIN so quickly.
The inner orbit to SDTM and plunge drains are why I had a LE in my house and simply could not get myself to play it frequently.
It still seemed no matter what I plunged, I still had a huge amount of insta-drains. So frustrating - not fun.
On our local IM even doing that doesn’t work, the ball just hits the under side of the flipper. I’ve even had the entire thing apart with the OP, but the shooter lane guide doesn’t have enough adjustment to fix it 
Exactly. Sure, skilled players may be able to avoid it, but that doesn’t matter. Per the title of the thread, the plunge is bad design. It’s obviously not intended for the ball to do that (just like it wasn’t intended for the scoop to shoot SDTM), and it can be adjusted, but if there there was a mech that broke this much of the time because it wasn’t properly adjusted, Stern would never put that mech in a game.
Maybe I misunderstood: if the auto-plunge in question is going straight from the plunger into the stand ups, and regularly straight down the left Outlane… that’s bad.
I was referring to SW copies I’ve played that are either Outlane drain monsters from the auto plunge, simply because the ball is out of control off the FORCE drops and in the slings. Which is no different from other auto plunge out of control games such as BSD.
If auto-plunge goes to the slings, that’s pretty rare from SW I’ve played. Half of them I’ve played make a bee-line for an outlane without ever hitting slings, drops, flippers. It seems like it’s supposed to go from the 3-bank to the drops but I’ve never seen that happen on one in the wild.
Ah, there’s the difference then: the 3? 4? I’ve played in the wild went from the standups to the FORCE targets, and then out of control. It was infrequent (but possible) that it went standups straight to L outlane.
One of ours locally I’ve watched plunge six balls out for jedi MB and every one rocketed straight into the right outlane
Plunger to 3-bank to right Outlane? That must be with The Power magnets turned on. 
It glanced off something on the left, but not the drops.
I’ve also seen games where a majority of plunges would just go 3-bank to left outlane, too fast to even hope to nudge.
My SW goes 3-bank->rubber below spinner->gate in front of plunger lane-> slings (usually, but the gate adds some randomness), which I don’t mind. It takes some work to get control but I almost never drain without getting a flip.
I’ve struggled with an automatic right outlane drain on a number of machines. Usually the FORCE drops are never even involved. The ball bounces off the 3-bank, to the rubber below the spinner, above the FORCE targets, and out the right outlane. With incredible consistency.
I have had one in my home since Pinburgh last year and don’t have the issues seen here. When properly setup it should go 3 bank > FORCE > to a nice live catch on the left flipper or dead bounce to the right flipper. It’s a great game when setup properly. Frustrating as all get out when not.
I just got mine to work reliably on monday. I adjusted the guide down pretty much all the way and lowered the auto-plunger coil power down to around 220 IIRC. This will likely cause the manual plunge to be misaligned so you’re gonna want to adjust the shooter rod position a bit to make sure it’s hitting the ball in the right spot to send the ball in the same path as the auto. I also bent my left side shooter guide inward slightly to narrow the shooter lane per Keiths suggestion in another thread and that seemed to help with consistancy. I don’t get the flipper smashes much at all now and the multiball staging almost always works. The game is on location and getting a ton of play. It set a new record for earnings over Star Wars the last couple weeks. 
Star Wars gets played by everyone that comes in the bar… once. I see a lot more people playing multiple games of Maiden and not just the location rats. I don’t want to pick on anyone because I’m sure there was a shitton of hard work put into designing and building that game but I really hope that the success of simpler games like TNA and games that have more balanced scoring opportunities like Maiden are the way of the future.
How would you even go about adjusting that though? Yours goes into the drops, mine goes into the rubber above them, but I assume yours also hits the center target of the 3 bank? Clearly the way it should work but I’ve never seen one do it
I’d start with new target foam.