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Where Can Paintball Improve? While following the sport of paintball, I've often wondered where the sport really needs to improve. Is it the cost? The difficulty in recruiting new players? The inherent differences between speedballers and woodsballers? The lack of media coverage?I'm very interested in ideas that my readers have, but I will also share some of my own thoughts.I think that paintball has done a fair job of making itself known, but I think a big problem is lack of advertising. I'm well aware that most fields don't have a huge advertising budget and manufacturers are dealing with tough economic times, but millions of people have no idea what paintball really is. Whenever I bring up paintball in a larger group I'm amazed at how little the general population knows about the sport - anything from not knowing that paintball players wear goggles to thinking paintballs are shot with gunpowder. The public needs to be educated and advertising seems to me to be the best way to do that.Another area where paintball can improve is to better serve the market. The simple truth is that piantball can be very expensive to play and the primary players are teenagers and young adults who lack expendable income. As I've mentioned before, unless paintball is the #1 priority, many college-aged players simply can't afford to play it on a regular basis. I'm not sure how to improve this as field owners really can't charge much less for entry fees, but a larger emphasis could be placed on outlaw fields and home-built courses coupled with competitive pump-play or capped rates of fire to save on paint. I've known a number of people who simply couldn't afford to continue to play the sport and have "retired" for a number of years before taking up the game again once they found a better-paying job.A final area where paintball can improve is to put more research money into lower-end equipment. While I will gladly admit that the Ego 10 is superior to the Ego 9, there are relatively very few players who buy top-end guns every year - it's time for some of Planet Eclipse's innovations to trickle down to sub-$200 market. More effort needs to be spent improving the Wal-Mart guns that the majority of paintball players start with. When a player first starts out, a reliable, simple-to-care-for paintball gun will hook them more than anything else. While I've been impressed with the improvements in manufacturing of low-end gear over the past few years (especially Spyder guns), it still needs to get better. When I suggest which gun a parent should buy for a child, I really want to be confident that the gun will work well the first time it's used and still be simple enough to be cleaned and maintained by an 8th grader (Tippmann, I'm looking at you). So far, reliability and simplicity don't go hand-in-hand with all of the low-end gear and mass production has lead to too many low-end lemons.Paintball is doing okay, but it could be doing better. Remember, there are manufacturers and important leaders in the industry who read this blog, including your comments, so now's your turn to share where you think paintball can improve.Where Can Paintball Improve? originally appeared on About.com Paintball on Thursday, January 21st, 2010 at 12:56:37.Permalink | Comment | Email this paintball.about.com |
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Paintball Nicknames Why do paintball players need nicknames? If you go into corporate America you will meet lots of Johns, Rachels and a few Mr. Smiths or President Coopers, but you don't meet very many Mad Dogs or Big Reds. Paintballers, though, love to give themselves names that the rest of the world doesn't know about.I'm just as guilty as anyone else - I've used the nickname "Miser" ever since I first chose a nickname to play a multiplayer computer game. Incidentally, I chose the name from another computer game character - the ghost miser from King's Quest IV, if you remember that game. There's nothing special about my nickname, I just liked the name as a kid and it has followed me onto the paintball field (unless I can just go as "Dave").I realize that nicknaming might be more prevalent in the woods than on the speedball field (though speedballers do come up with creative nicknames) and it's possible that the military-esque nature of woodsball suits the military tradition of nicknames for enlisted soldiers. I, though, have another theory:Paintball started gaining popularity in the mid-to-late '80s. At the same time in America, 1986 to be exact, Top Gun came out and everybody wanted to be known as Maverick or Goose or some other similar-type name. With paintball, though, the naming game just stuck. Then again, maybe not.If you have a creative paintball nickname, share it in the comments and tell us the story behind it.Paintball Nicknames originally appeared on About.com Paintball on Wednesday, March 10th, 2010 at 18:17:36.Permalink | Comment | Email this paintball.about.com |