Commitment

In my job as a facilitator of paintball games, I’m often amazed by the lack of commitment and respect for others No, not lack of respect for others on the field, although that can be a problem as well, but I’m talking about the disrespect in lack of commitment.

Rarely do we get a group at our field where the total number of pre-registered guests show up at the field. This is even true for groups where the individuals within the group have paid a deposit. I’ve noticed for a long time that there has been a cultural change where people don’t feel as obligated to follow through on commitments they have made. For that matter, people hesitate to even make commitments these days. It’s almost like they know beforehand that something might come along that will keep them from honouring any commitment they might make, so they rarely make any. Almost all sports are suffering for it. Participation in virtually every major sport is down, paintball included, especially competitive paintball where the commitment is a big one.

In our own business (recreational paintball field), I’ve noticed a big shift over the years from advanced pre-booked groups to many more drop-in players. I constantly get calls these days asking if we are open because the caller and a couple of friends thought it would be neat to come and play paintball for a few hours. It’s spur of the moment decision making, rather than well in advance planning.

Statistics Canada says that participation in organized sports by adults was down to 28% (7.3 million) in 2005 from 34% (8.3 million) in 1998, and 45% (9.6 million) in 1992. That’s a substantial drop. Adults weren’t the only ones dropping out. Teens (15 to 18) went from 77% in 1992 to 59% in 2005. This indicates to me that the adult participation drop isn’t due to an aging adult population, although that does factor in. The number one reason cited was lack of time.

People have become busier over the years. I know I certainly have. My parents seemed to have a much less busy life and their parents even more so. There are just so many more things to see and do and take part in today. And we all seem to want to try so many different things. I think it’s part of the “me” generation. My generation was taught that we should do and try anything we wanted. And we want to try it all. Past generations did what was “expected of them”, giving up self indulgences for the good of their family. My kids’ generation is even more self indulgent and I assume the next generation will be the same or more so. There is no room for commitment anymore.

Is it any wonder that competitive paintball participation is sliding? Is it really all that much different than any other sport that needs participants to make huge commitments? Throw in the fact that it’s very expensive to take part and many sponsorships have disappeared, competitive paintball is facing a huge uphill battle. Those of you that have made the commitment to competitive paintball, I suggest you hold on tight, because it’s going to be a rocky ride. Things are going to get tougher before they get better

Speedball...a game developed during different times

For the longest time (actually for just about all of paintball’s history), paintball industry, competitive paintball, and even regular recreational players worked on increasing a player’s advantage by increasing dependable rate of fire. Competitive paintball evolved alongside this parallel evolution of equipment. The third parallel was the evolution of paintball production. Players shot more due to better, faster equipment, and paintball manufacturers were able to streamline production to meet the demands of those players with their new equipment. It really didn’t matter to them whether they produced 10 million cases or 50 million cases as long as their bottom line was bigger than their prior year’s bottom line. Heck, the paintball manufacturers even encouraged the high rates of fire. They sponsored and supplied teams with cheap and even free paint to encourage all the up and comers to shoot lots of paint just like the big boys. Shoot lots of paint and you too may stand on the podium at the Big Show one day and have your face and name in print.

So the competitive game evolved in that atmosphere. But that atmosphere is gone. The sponsorships from paintball manufacturers have been cut back drastically and even local fields and stores have re-evaluated their thoughts on their speedball portions of their businesses. Is it really worth it to give the big wig local team a free ride? What is the local field accomplishing by doing this? Free/cheap paint encourages lots of paint being shot during competition. But can the players/teams that need to pay for their paint keep up? Can they be competitive against the local big wig team getting their paint for free/cheap? Probably not. Not for a long term, sustainable period anyway. So what do the other teams do? Try for as long as they can and then eventually, when drained, drop out and find another, less costly interest.

I’m sure for those currently involved in competitive paintball, in the style similar to what the pros play, that they are having fun playing. But how long can it be sustained? And by how many? The writing is on the wall. And it has been for a long time...in big bold writing. The current game evolved during different times. Times that are now part of history. It’s time to write the future...if you want a future. Or...you can continue doing what you are doing and become part of history.

Auto-triggering

Maybe it’s because I’m older than the average paintball player, but I really don’t like high rates of fire. It was confirmed again this weekend during West Coast Pump Weekend. I played most of the day on Sunday during the “recreation” portion of the two day event.
There were a couple of times where I was “lit up”. It was by pump players using auto triggers. For those of you that don’t know what auto-triggering is, basically it means holding down the trigger of the marker and then pumping the pump handle of the maker continuously. Each time the pump handle is cycled, one paintball will be shot. So basically you can shoot as fast as you can move your hand (theoretically .68”) back and forth. Depending on how smooth (easy) the pump stroke is, auto-triggering can be quite fast. With the “hitman” mod, basically all a player needs to do is hold the trigger down and pull the vertical part of the pump arm, much like a trigger, approximately .68” and it’s not a whole lot different than any mechanical semi-automatic.
I’m an experienced player and getting hit 5 times in the span of a second or so, wasn’t that big of a deal for me. I certainly didn’t freak out on my assailants. As a matter of fact, I said nothing at all to them. But that doesn’t mean that I was happy about it. It just meant that I wouldn’t give them the satisfaction of letting them know I didn’t enjoy the experience.
Paintball players have always looked for an advantage over their opponents. Pump players are no different I guess (at least some of them). During the evolution of our sport, auto-triggering was a big contributor to creating an advantage over other players. It’s interesting for me that history seems to be repeating itself.
In general, I feel pump players play pump to get back to the “honour” of the game. Back to a time when things were more mellow and more even for those who took part. Yet just as in the past, there are those that want an upper hand.
I don’t know if there is anything that can be done about the situation. It’s just an interesting observation. History does tend to repeat itself.

WCPW ’10 – The Aftermath

It’s over, for another year at least. The time leading up to West Coast Pump Weekend is always the most stressful time of the year for me, although it does seem to be getting a little easier every year (mostly because I just don’t care quite as much anymore about making everyone happy).

This year, the 4th, was the most successful event so far, not only as attendance goes, but also from the feedback I was getting from many of the players. Over the course of the two days we had over 70 pump players taking part, some just Saturday for the fun pump speedball event and some just Sunday for the recreational all pump games, but the vast majority playing both days.

I personally played most of Sunday in the recreational games and had a blast. I didn’t witness a single hostile moment from a single player. Everyone just had a great time.

I did not take part in Saturday’s fun tournament (other than organizing and overseeing that things went as smoothly as possible). The vast majority of the players had a great time on Saturday as well, but there were a few hiccups. What is it about adding the word competition or tournament to an event that makes people’s attitudes change? Saturday’s players were virtually the same players as Sunday’s players, yet on Saturday, during the “tournament”, some of the players just seem to feel the need to make the event much more serious than it needs to be. We don’t have prizes or even huge trophies. We don’t have a huge rule book, because we don’t feel we need it. It’s supposed to be a competition played for “fun”. It’s a bunch of pump players, playing the game we love and playing with honour.

Don’t get me wrong. It wasn’t a disaster. As a matter of fact, I’d say that 95% of the participants had a great time and even the other 5% had a good time the majority of the time. The ones that seemed to have problems were those that have gone from being pump players to also being regular tournament speedball players. And on Sunday, during recreational play, these players were their regular good natured selves again. But when glass beer mugs were on the line, the need to complain and throw fits surfaced.

Every year after this event, I reaffirm the decision my business partner and myself made, shortly after we started TNT Paintball, to not enter the speedball/tournament paintball business. It’s not that I hate speedball and tournament. I’m actually a competitive person by nature. But it’s a whole lot easier to run a paintball field (and a business) without needing to deal with the attitudes that seem to surface when the words competition or tournament are present.

So we will most likely be hosting WCPW’11, even if it is a lot of work and we make more money on a regular weekend with just recreational play. And there will hopefully be even more pump players taking part, coming from even farther distances. And we’ll put up with the attitudes that come with competition. But only to a point. If it gets too much, we’ll pull the plug. If winning a “fun pump speedball tournament” becomes too important for too many players, we’ll let others deal with it and we’ll bow out.

West Coast Pump Weekend 2010

A little self promotion is on the agenda.

WCPW ’10 is coming up quickly. If you are into a fun weekend of all pump paintball, WCPW is an event you don’t want to miss out on. Ask anyone who has been at prior WCPW’s. Great fun, great people, great venue.

Saturday July 31 is our fun 3-man Pump Speedball event and Sunday August 1 is all pump recreational play on TNT paintball’s 5 great recreational fields. TNT Paintball is locatd in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada.

More information can be found at: http://www.tntpaintball.com/wcpw/

Register by Saturday July 25 to receive the discounted early registration rate.

Primal Instincts

It was another good day at TNT Paintball yesterday. Why a good day? People had fun. With about 100 people in attendance, playing in three separate games, there were no major conflicts, disagreements, or arguments. In all honesty, I consider most days at the field good days for those reasons.

We had our fair share of tweens and teens, mostly boys, a few women thrown into the mix and probably about 50% men 18 or older. It was not actually a totally typical day as far as demographics go (although it wasn’t particularly unusual either) as the number of women was a little higher than normal. Some days we can have 100 people and have no women at all. It’s always been the industry’s hope that more women would get involved in paintball. First to increase the numbers by widening the demographics, but also with more women at paintball fields, it’s only natural for even more men to show up. Funny how that works.

Quite often the women that do come to the field, play a lot less than the men do. They show up, play a couple of games and then sit and wait for the men to finish having their fun. Many even come prepared with a book in hand. That tells me that they knew before they even got to the field, that they may be bowing out early.

I’m not a Psychologist or an anthropologist, but I’ve always been interested in why people do what they do. As a paintball field owner, obviously I’m interested in why people play paintball and conversely, why they don’t. Men prefer to play paintball much more than women. That’s a given. But why?

My take on it is that paintball, although a game in that everyone takes part willingly and people play it for fun, is still basically a hunting or battle game. Players hunt players but they are also hunted. Throughout humankind existence, who have been the hunters? Men, of course. Women stayed back (and did basically everything else) while the men put themselves in danger hunting their prey, or while battling other tribes. Sure there have been a few women throughout history that have taken part in the dangers of battle (Joan of ark comes to mind), but, just like they are rarely seen at a paintball field, they were few and far between. It’s just not part of most women’s instincts. It is for men though. But even men have varying amounts of that primal instinct. There have always been men that take the leading roll in the charge of battle and also those that fall back a bit and take a little less intense roll.

But we are talking paintball, not hunting Sabre Tooth Tigers or fighting the battle of Stalingrad. It’s a game and a player can choose to quit anytime they feel uncomfortable. I guess that’s why some of the women bring books. The instinct to take part in battle is not strong in women. It probably never will be.

Next time we’ll try to analyze why players continue playing even though they may not have strong primal instincts and how they cope.

Observations at PbNation

PbNation.com is the world’s largest paintball community, no doubt. I have an account there and hang out in the Field/Store Owners section and in all honesty rarely check out much else. I took a few moments to glance at the main page today and a couple of thnngs caught my attention.

In the General Paintball section, the busiest section, by quite a large margin is the “Paintball Talk” forum, with over 4.2 million posts (not sure when the counting started by the way). That makes sense. It’s a paintball forum after all and people are going to drop by and talk paintball.

But it’s not the busiest section on PbNation.com. No. That honour goes to the “Small Talk” forum in the Off-Topic section with over 7.2 million posts. That’s quite a few more and those posts have nothing to do with paintball. At first I thought that was pretty odd. Why are all these people coming to a paintball forum and then opting to talk about a whole lot of stuff that has nothing to do with paintball? Then it occurred to me that Pbnation.com is like a community. People meet there because they share a general interest, much like a club meeting. But anyone that has ever been together with a group of people, knows that conversations wander. It doesn’t take long before subjects having to do with the shared interest are left behind and other things are debated.

The other thing that caught my attention was in the Paintball Marker Manufacturers sections. That is where each Marker Manufacturer has it’s own little section for people to drop in and talk about that brand of marker. I would hazard a guess that the popularity of each section would be a testament to the popularity of the brands of the markers. So why is it, that the most populated section in the Paintball Marker Manufacturers (again by a fairly large margin) is one that couldn’t hold it together and is no longer in business? The Smart Parts forum has over 1.6 million posts with second place, Planet Eclipse forum lagging a ways behind with just over 1 million posts. After that, rankings drop pretty quick. Tippmann for instance, has a dismal .2 million posts. Tippmann! I thought almost half the people in the paintball world started marker ownership with a Tippmann. I guess they don’t have a lot to talk about. Maybe Smart Parts and Planet Eclipse forums are full of threads with people trying to solve problems with the markers. I don’t know, I didn’t actually go into those forum sections.

Anyway, just a couple on things that caught my attention and I thought a little odd. But then, there are more than just a couple of things odd at PbNation.com.