kiwigat

So you may have heard of the NSL ,  a new paintball league in the USA with a few ideas. The core concept is that of a "live flag" meaning essentially that the flag is in play during the game rather than being an afterthought once you've eliminated the competition. How do you do that though? How do you make teams actually want to get the flag rather than just waiting til they've shot everyone? And even if they do get the flag, why would they risk it all trying to score and push up when there are still opposing players alive? It just makes sense to play conservative most of the time in the current game, since a player that's safe in a bunker and concentrating on holding a lane will be a more effective shooter than one who's out in the open or focussed on moving up. What do the NSL do well? Well, the core idea of a live flag game makes sense. We need a focal point and the flag provides that. The touchdown line rather than a hang station makes scoring feasi...

*Updated April 2015* Paintball is hard to watch. I don't think I need to explain it in detail since being here you've probably thought about it, but most folks will say it's because there's no focal point. And that's probably true. It's freaking hard to watch a sport when you don't know where to look (like football). It's even harder to watch a sport when learning all about the sport doesn't even make it that much easier (unlike football). Paintball is screwed, they say. Let's give up on making it watchable and just enjoy playing. It aint broke so don't fix it. Bah. Yeah, so people have tried. The NSL. Redzone tried too, probably more successfully. Moneyball... let's not even go there. But do we really need a whole new format ? Nah. Just a few tweaks to what we've got. Here's a few potential ways. 1. Make that pull worth something Sexy, sexy flagpull. If you make a pull matter, teams will be more likely to grab the ...

Not next year. Not even ten years from now. Most folks don't seem that interested or seem to assume that things will just continue along roughly the path they've been on so far. Unfortunately for them the future would say otherwise. There's a technology on the horizon that could   will  make paintball, airsoft, RAM, CoD and just about everything else redundant. It already exists in a primitive form and there are no real technological breakthroughs still needed. It will let you feel hits like paintball, will no longer rely on honesty, and it'll revolutionise the spectator appeal of the sport. It's called Augmented Reality, and maybe you already have it on your phone in a basic form. Meanwhiles google are actively developing it in the form of Google Glasses:- A little exaggerated! Here's how it would work. Everyone has some special gear - at minimum goggles and a gun, but potentially more if you want to feel hits via small electric shocks (see IRTac...

If you're going to make a paintball game, you need to do it like this. Focus on one league only, like the PSP. Ignore woodsball because that's better served by games like CoD, and because paintball is a small market and you dont have the cash to throw around on redundant content. Focus on the gameplay first and foremost. Capture the experience. What does a team have to deal with at a major tournament? Weather affects sliding distances and stamina. Refs running around can be distracting. Crowd noise and coaching. Individual skills unique to paintball need to be included to get the feel right. Reloading while shooting is a big one. Slides, dives, running and gunning, communication. All of this could be built into an RPG system *if* you have the time and money. Use a new distribution model like steam, XBLA, PSN. Don't waste money putting boxes on shelves. Get the basic gameplay right before worrying about how many markers you have in the game. You can add that sort of ...

Over the last while I've been considering the problems with tournament paintball as it stands. It's all ended up in this idea that I think could make paintball more accessible as a sport. RaceTo is awesome, but I have just one suggestion. It's very simple: Remove the flags and replace them with touchdown style lines. That's it. Call it vBall for now, just for the sake of having a name. It's not at all like moneyball, bacaball or the new NPPL TVball (or whatever). Those all had a big problem in common - unnecessary complexity for the referees, players and spectators. Bacaball was terrible for this with four different ref flags and four field flags. Moneyball was doomed from the start - everyone knew on sight that it would have massive issues with enforcing the line of advancement kill law. Nobody really seems to know what's going on with NPPL TVball, least of all casual spectators. My system has avoided these problems. Here's the reasoning behind the ...

left - CEP are a Christian based paintball team that now play in the professional division of the PSP "Isn't it unchristian to shoot people?" Good question. I gotta admit I love shooting people. With paint. I'm not bad at it either - not that great, but I've certainly had the odd moment of goodness. Still I gotta get a few things straight here as far as my faith is concerned because people don't really seem to understand what it actually means to be a Christian these days. Anyways it's Easter right so... yeah. Figure it's a good time to put the two together! Paintball can be a pretty lame sort of a thing at times. Materialism - the love of possessions, hating someone even if it's just on a sports field, the sexualisation of the sport that goes on, the "look at me in my flash gears" vanity, the downright disgusting attitudes. I don't think Jesus would be a fan of any of that, and not just because he's Jesus or whatever - th...

Wow I'm really jumping around the topics these days. The last post was on fixing speedball, the one before that was an attempt to define milsim, and now I'm all the way back to milsim again! I'vep been running into a few discussions online lately about milsim paintball. A common theme was that 68 cal paintball isn't the best way to simulate the military as far as these things go - most folks seemed to think that .43 cal RAM does that better. I'm not sure I agree. Now there are a bunch of ways to simulate real combat including things like strapping laser tag units to real guns firing blanks or using simunitions, but I wont include those two as they aren't available to average Joe Schmoe. What is available to us is RAM, airsoft, paintball and laser tag. Laser tag can be discounted quickly - the milsim style laser tag guns are huge and innaccurate, you can only be shot in the head or gun, and the people running the games will rarely do proper scenarios. The real qu...