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Trolling the Forums When I first started playing paintball in the late '90s, I was introduced to a group of players who literally taught me the game. Their paintball knowledge in turn came from other players at local fields, store owners and random players they'd met while playing the sport. Getting a valuable tidbit of paintball knowledge usually required listening to more experienced players for seemingly hours on end. There was no central hub for paintball and it was common to receive contradictory information literally from one day to the next.With the advent of the internet, paintball finally found a centralized location to share information. Rather than having these stories shared only between a handful of players in the staging area of a local field, these same conversations have now been immortalized on the internet in printed form. Now a curious player has literally millions of threads to read about literally every aspect of the sport. Whether its rumors, debates about guns, questions on tinkering or simply sharing stories of games played, paintball forums make it so beginning players can immerse themselves in the world of paintball without leaving their own home.There are dozens of paintball-centric forums around the web that cover the whole sport or even focus on smaller aspects of it such as one brand of paintball gun. The largest include PBNation.com and mcareterbrown.com while one of my personal personal favorites is automags.org. These forums are a great resource to ask questions and learn from more experienced players, but the archived threads are a treasure of information. The information still must be gleaned as you read through countless inane comments, but useful information is almost always there to find.Trolling the Forums originally appeared on About.com Paintball on Wednesday, July 21st, 2010 at 23:26:47.Permalink | Comment | Email this paintball.about.com |
It Pays To Be a Sport The first time playing paintball is something you never forget - the location, the people involved and often how the games were won or lost. You also remember how people acted and whether they were good sports or overly aggressive jerks. Odds are, if you're still playing, they were the former.I've taken dozens and dozens (if not hundreds) of people paintballing for their first time in intimate, small-group settings, where I provided the equipment, explained the rules, oversaw the games and did all in my power to make sure they had a lot of fun. Of the many people who have gone a few have really taken to the sport, but all of them have a positive opinion of the game.On other days, I've been to walk-on fields and professional fields where first-timers were left on their own, never really understood the game and were picked on by the more experienced players. Rather than encourage the new players or congratulate them on getting a kill, I've seen the experienced players walk off the field and swearing and complaining that something wasn't right or else the newbie never would have got the kill. I don't know if those new players ever played again, but if it had been my first time, I definitely wouldn't have been back.The way to make sure that paintball continues to grow and progress as a sport is to encourage the life blood of the sport - the new players who will come, enjoy the sport and come back for more. Even if they don't adopt the sport, they will have had a positive experience and let other potential players know that. The best way to kill the sport is to destroy the first impression of new players. Most professional fields do a pretty good job of this but the real difference maker is the regulars at the field who actually play in the games.The only way paintball will grow is if we encourage the next generation of paintballers to take up the sport. Giving them an ideal first impression is the first step in making it happen.It Pays To Be a Sport originally appeared on About.com Paintball on Tuesday, August 31st, 2010 at 18:08:41.Permalink | Comment | Email this paintball.about.com |