This weekend was PAPA 15. Remember how terribly I did at PAPA 14? I did worse this year. At 80th in C, numerically it's my worst finish ever, though when you take into account the number of players in the division I actually did worse in 2010. And with my last place finish in my division in summer league and -- it can now be revealed -- my bottom 25% B Division finish at Pinburgh, I have been having a pretty crappy year of competitive pinball.
To be fair, I only put in one entry at PAPA because I only went for one day. I decided to try a day trip after I was so unhappy with my performance last year, but I ended up being unhappy going for just one day this year. So I'm unhappy if I go for three days and I'm unhappy if I go for one day.
Ideally, my best course of action would be to figure out why I've been in such a slump (which I think started right after Pinburgh 2011) and go from there, but I don't know if it's that easy.
The best thing I can say about this year's PAPA was that on my one good qualifying game, Monster Bash, I was a Creature and a sax away from starting Monsters of Rock, which would have netted me a $100 bounty. I was modestly happy about that. Also I got to play the new X-Men game, which seemed OK.
So I got home on Thursday after my day at PAPA feeling OK, but my attitude deteriorated along with my position in the standings. Friday I was increasingly miserable, Saturday I was really irritated, and today I feel a little better but still have a core of frustration gnawing at my soul. And the best way for me to deal with that is to get a bunch of crap done around the house.
I've been sporadically working on Doctor Who's reset problem (which it has, in case I haven't mentioned it before) by working through the Pinwiki troubleshooting guide for WPC resets. I went through the first couple -- testing my power, etc. -- but gave up when I got to the point where I actually had to do stuff, like repinning connectors. But one of the items caught my interest, about determining if the thermistor in the line filter was the problem if the game stops resetting after it warms up. So I turned the game on and let it sit for an hour then played a bunch of games on it, and wouldn't you know that crazy gizmo really worked (the right ramp switch works intermittently which made Sonic Booms difficult, but otherwise it was fine). Now, that doesn't mean the problem is the thermistor -- it could still be bad connectors that get chummier as they warm up -- but at least I can play it.
I've also been trying to diagnose Black Knight's fuse blowing shenanigans, but sometimes when I work on BK I make it worse than it was before, and I wasn't prepared for that.
But when I'm irritated I need success stories, so I took on some easy tasks. Last season, when I actually qualified for playoffs in league, one of the prizes I picked (in addition to Roger Sharpe's Pinball! book... extreme score!) were 5 keyless locks for coin doors. I installed those on most of my machines (Eight Ball Deluxe and Comet were left off -- did I mention that I bought a Comet? Probably not).
Then I went for a slightly more challenging job: When I put Eight Ball Deluxe on location for one of the league tournaments last year, I of course had to disconnect the free credit button. When I got around to reconnecting it, I wanted to wire in a toggle switch so that I could activate and deactivate the button without removing the wire. So on Friday I bought a simple two prong toggle switch at Radio Shack and put it in line with the wire I had disconnected from the button. Rather than soldering everything together, I used some conductive wire glue that my daughter gave me for Father's Day... which I'll admit was easier than busting out the soldering station. It works great, so on Saturday I got another switch and performed the same surgery on Paragon.
I still don't have a really good plan to get out of my slump, but I've got at least a month to figure something out, and at least my games work a little better now.
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