Paintball Magazine Paintball.Media Magazine May 2016 | Page 123

OVER THE YEARS, our industry has been shamelessly

slow when responding to some of our sport’s more serious
problems. I’m not altogether sure why we are so slow to act but
if my wife is to be believed, it’s because us men-folk are notorious
when it comes to getting up off our fat ass and actually doing
something. I’m gonna wuss out and go ‘no comment’ on that one
for fear of the wife dishing out yet another dollop of nag-pie served
up for dinner. That aside, if we cast our attention back a few years
to the problems we had on the tournament circuit, more specifically
in the pro divisions, with designer-gun cheating.
The markers that were being misused back then had the firmware
code in their markers cynically ‘adjusted’ to achieve not only
greater rates of fire than was allowed, but in some cases, and far
more dangerous, higher FPS than the 300 FPS limit.
The previously hidden Allen-key stashed on your body somewhere
has now been replaced by a computer back at home as the
chosen method of cheating. Such is the ingenuity of those who
seek to win by any means. If some poor soul had been injured
with an illegally-configured marker during that time, I dread to
think of the fall-out from such a catastrophe. But thankfully, more
by luck than judgement, we somehow managed to avoid that
particular disasters.

but this time, something was fundamentally wrong with the
number of players being channelled through into tournament
play. The numbers were but a fraction of what we were once used
to. Leagues throughout the US and Europe were struggling to
maintain any semblance of growth. Worse still, some leagues and a
lot of stores (particularly so in the US) had their armbands removed
and were taking the long walk toward paintball’s final dead-box
in the sky.
Turnovers were down across the board but more alarmingly, this
slide was steepening. The sale of high-end markers, loaders and
associated gear has always been the life force of our retail industry,
but now, the future was ominously uncertain. This problem was
never gonna be a quick-fix because underwriting this decline was
the slowdown in the general economy that Europe and the US were
experiencing, and let’s face it, paintball ain’t the cheapest game to
play at the best of times, especially tournament paintball.

DARK CLOUDS AMASS IN THE DISTANCE
Our problem was alarmingly simple but the answer to it was
somewhat more elusive. We needed to stimulate regrowth in the
retail market, which basically translates out to needing more players

The sickening thing was, our pro players were supposed to
represent the best there was in our sport, they should have been
players to look up to and respect, but the message going out
during that era was that winning by any means was acceptable. It
seemed the appetite of the industry to resolve this problem was
somewhat compromised by its own complicity, tacit or otherwise. I
can barely think of an era in our sport that has ventured so far into
the murky depths of such blatant skulduggery. And if any of those
pros were confronted with their decision to embrace the dark
side, which I did on several occasions, I was met with the oblique
but somewhat predictable defensive “Everyone else was doing
it, we just followed suit”. Such excuses provided the mechanism
to abandon all notions of fair play but eventually, sanity returned
albeit uncomfortably late. (Rant over.)
This was a sorry chapter indeed, but a far greater threat to our sport
had been lurking in the backwaters; that of an acute decrease in
players migrating across from the site and rec-ball market over to
playing tournaments. This migration had always been the lifeblood
of tournament play and as such, our industry had always taken it
for granted. But our sport was entering darker times, darker than
most had anticipated.
There are always ups and downs in any trends related to paintball,

Richmond Italia in 2000.

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