Paintball Media Magazine August 2004 | Page 87

Between the Producers and the Players
around the globe to play for their squads . From the Axis perspective , they start out with a distinct disadvantage . As was demonstrated in the now-infamous Chad “ Yaya ” Bouchez Instagram video : Everyone wants to run out of the boats .
That is where the cameras are , and frankly , while the temperatures may be cooler in the woods , the play really isn ’ t . The turkey shoot from the “ German ” side gets rather boring after a while . To add insult to injury , Axis players will often spend more money on paint in the first hour of the game than they do for the rest of the weekend just trying to keep the Allies from pushing into the woods and breaking the game . And honestly , how long does anyone want to sit in one spot shooting at targets that refuse to call themselves out .
From an Allied perspective , the game is literally stacked against them . It is built that way . Just as the Allied Army that stormed the actual beaches of Normandy on that fateful day of days in June of 1944 had to fight for every inch , the game is structured as an uphill battle from start to finish for the Allies . They literally have to fight their way through the beach head , and they are pinned into their insertion from the jump .
Yet , the Allied Army at Skirmish has managed to develop such a wellorganized machine that they continue to dominate the game , regardless of what is thrown at them . This year , no less than seventy-five percent of the points of the game were concentrated in ten-percent of the field - the ten-percent that just happens to be in front of the German insertion - and still , the game came down to the final flag hang .
From radio communications to organizational management , the Allied Army at Skirmish is quite literally becoming a professional organization that both the Axis and Skirmish have to contend with . And recently , it seems the producers are willing to bend the rules to do so .

Between the Producers and the Players

From a producer ’ s perspective , the strength of the Allied organization presents a legitimate challenge . No one wants to attend a game that always ends in the same result . So , the game producers , Terry Breslin and Sky Fogal , have to continually create new , and innovative ways to handicap the Allies . To date , they have been rather successful in this . Over the past 12 seasons , victory has been awarded six times to the Allies and six times to the Axis , with the title being passed between the two armies in rotation nearly every year .
Unfortunately , that message has not carried through to the players . In fact , players who have attended IoN for years speak rather solemnly about the degradation and simplification in the game . A lot of the flavor that once made the game both unpredictable and unique has been eliminated . No longer are there elements like a third contingent in the French Army , role players , and widely dispersed missions that utilized far more of the field . Longtime players remember the old metal buildings out in Paris that , dilapidated as they were , made for some of the most epic close-proximity paintball battles in scenario history . And what
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