Boycott BE?!?!?!

[CoFFeY[NiTrO]]

I too am sick of them taking over all the good quality stuff. A few days ago I started up my 9vlt hopper. Guess what. The eye int he neck started smoking@!!!!!!!!!!!!@@@@@

[HoppysMag]

I have an UNDYING HATRED of BE. but boycotting wont do anygood. we need to invest in other companys. If you dont like BE/JT/VL. Get a scott mask,or a Ricochet loader. Well now that i think about it that would be boycotting wouldnt it..... iv decided to buy a better hopper anyway, mabey il get a ricochet. i need a new mask, mabey a Stalker. but i wanna check out the XFires to see if they are still ok.... i donno im so confused.......:confused: :confused: :confused:

[RT pRo AuToMaG]

i got it, dye mask, HALO, Smart Parts jersey and pants, just my $.02. Hey they are WAY too powerful. other companys make mask and jerseys besides JT. but they don't get any $ for their products.

[FooTemps]

Does BE really have this much power over paintball? I didn't really think they did. I know that they bought out JT and VL but that doesn't mean that JT and VL are BE. It's like how ford bought out mazda and how renault bought out nissan. They are under a single ownership but are operating 2 different businesses...

Forgot to add that they both sell different products under different names. If BE bought out JT and VL and plastered their name on all JT and VL products it would be a different story.

[PAINTBALLA01]

personally i hate be. I had a stingray for my first gun and not too long after i bought it some metal part in the internals cracked in half.

[Predater]

this reminds me of when nike got invalved in the inline skate indestry. that cheep crapy company baught out 3 of the top skate companys and started producing crap. they baught out airwalk and started making cheep crappy shoes that look like all the other nikes. they baught Bawer and stopped all the current skates that wer the top of the indestry and braught out some that always broke and wer just plain crap. the last company they just baught because it was there competition. i wont buy anything i know is made by nike because of this.

first off, i have a 18v revy. when be baught vl they got rid of 18 v and regulated it with resisters down to 12. that sucked. so i have just worked on my hopper to keep it working. 12 v sucks. when vl was baught all the color vlbows wer discontinued. i think you can buy them now but they wer discontinued. vl had just came out with color hoppers. i mean like tiger stripe and mossy oak. that kind of color. they wer cool. be stopped production. and only produced black and clear. they now have color again but its solid. not the cool camo. be cheepend vl right off the bat. its true.

jt, thats a difrent story. i dont know anything they have affected there. the deal with the recall is just releasing the mask too early. look at the deal with the super bolt. it got recalled. is that from cheep marketing? no. it was rushing to much. i said i dont know anything. they probably have affected things but i dont know.

i will do the same thing with be that i still do with nike. when my pre be hopper finaly dies i will go halo. and when my pre be specta dies i will go dye. the mask is starting to get cracks in the ear pieces so it is about to dy. What can i say, a 6 year old mask will eventuly die.

[MrAirgunRT]

i personally like the flex 7 spectras.. its what i wear, but everything else i'll boycott :p

[FooTemps]

How many customers does BE have? maybe about 80% of all paintballers. The newbs have stingrays and talons, the pros have hoppers and jersies and those rec players have jt products too. I mean, I doubt 1000 people would make THAT big of an impact on their company...

[mrhooie]

Life's too short to whine about one of the top companies leading the cheer for paintball

whether you like them or not

life's too short

[Kaiser Bob]

If im not mistaken VL regulated the 18V shredders down to 12V cause the extra voltage wreaked havoc on the motors etc. Correct me if im wrong.

[BlackVCG]

To clarify, BE didn't switch to the Revolution or design it to replace the 18V Shredder. CM Support realized the 18V was too much and came up with the design of the Revolution long before they got bought out. After BE bought out VL BE they used cheaper material, changed the neck size and changed the board to fix the clear Revy problems. This is why there's Pre-BE Revy's and BE Revy's.

[SlipknotX556]

ill boycott everything, im wit coffey they are taking over everything that is good.

[CRySyS]

You know coffey, I'm thinking about it and I can't come up with a way to get the components in the eye to start smoking, even if you reverse the connector. Are you telling a superbolt story?

As for the neck size, BE didn't reduce it to save money on plastic raw material, thats just ludicrus. The brought he neck size down to the standard that all other hoppers had been using except the revy. At the same time gun manufacturers had started making their vert. feeds bigger to accomodate the larger revy. So you had revies that were too small for the feed necks.

CM support had the same problems with the eye being tripped by sunlight. You know what their solution was? Paint the neck black to block out sunlight. All well and good but the paint would come off eventually. BE actually tried to fix the problem but ended up with a delay i the board. They have since come up with the X-board which works great.

And don't knock the Evlution either, that was also CM supports patent, not BEs.

Anyway, don't knock the company for making crappy guns, you think they have a monopoly on plastic guns? What about the PMI traacer, it got recalled because a malfunctioning tank could crack the air chamber open but I don't hear rants about how PMI makes total crap. And what about The Spyder sport, that gun has a greater percentage of plastic in its design that a stingray, at least all the stress bearing parts in the ray are metal. And lets not forget all the high dollar crap that people will vigorously defend for the sole reason that they dump a hell of a lot of money into their equipment and don't want to look like they got took. I hear the Matrix finally has all it bugs worked out but I still haven't seen a working one in town. Oh and if you bought a cocker in '95 you had a gun that almost needed upgrades out of the box to make it work right. You didn't even get a ball detent! Thats a crappy gun but Bud is god and he gave up free guns so we will pimp his stuff forever or so say some sponsored teams. Of course its a great gun out of the box and you can belive me because I actually paid for one. And why does my board in my Angel keep frying and why do I have to sand out the breech just to make it shoot?

[inhale][exhale]

The point being just because a company makes low end products does not make them bad, even most high end products were crap at some point in their development. But the stuff they make that you do use has reached a point where it works well, I don't hear many complaints about x-boarded revies. Thay are just a company like every other producer in the biz and they goal of a company is to make money. Don't kidd yourdelf there, every comapnies goal is to make money. The better ones make great stuff and back it up with great service because that insures that you will tell everyone you know how great they are, making more money for that company. Others just pour their product on the market because consumers are sheep and we buy up the newest stuff reguardless of how good it is or whether we need it or not. Unless it looks stupid, then we won't buy it even if it does work good.

And I've drifted yet again. Just don't hate BE for reaons that are unfounded. Hate them for good reasons and if you really mean what you say you won't buy anything made by them. If enough people do that they will see in their profit margin and be forced to react. The end.

Wow, all that crap above for a three sentence point. I should be a political speech writer. ;)

[soilent green]

JT has gone down hill latly and VL is crap now and well we all know what crap BE is

[Hasty8]

Originally posted by FooTemps
How many customers does BE have? maybe about 80% of all paintballers. The newbs have stingrays and talons, the pros have hoppers and jersies and those rec players have jt products too. I mean, I doubt 1000 people would make THAT big of an impact on their company...

"Whatever the case, the shares are down some 75% from their all-time highs of May as sales disappointments the company attributed to a bevy of problems with its retail partners -- Brass Eagle relies heavily upon sales from the likes of Wal-Mart (NYSE: WMT) and Kmart (NYSE: KM) -- took their toll"

Excerpt taken from Fool.com reporting, the full text of which can be found here: http://www.fool.com/news/1999/xtrm991220.htm?ref=newreg

With BE in their current limping state I think 1000 people would make a very poignant statement.

[Hysperion]

no wonder they're suing odyssey, they're desperate for cash....

[lazyrider77]

i don't hate BE, my first gun was made by them. it wasn't anything special but i had a lto of fun with it. However, their elitist attitude about motorized hoppers has got to go, they are holding back advancements in paintball technology for their own profit. i don't knwo if a boycott wil work in this society, but i like the idea of sending BE a message that their practices need to stop.

[LaW]

They are not really holding back advancements because if the product comes out what will most likely happen is that they'll sue blah blah win and then start producing that product... It's kind of how they work :)

[Spaceman613]

And where is the precedent for this statement???

[LaW]

What'll happen i'm saying is that like BE will buy the rights to the halo or some crap like that. It's just something they'd do and is something I can see them doing....

[mac2k4]

i'm sayin the same thing as CRySyS
i bet everyone would go crazy if ya called AGD sorry cause their "super" bolt thing broke in half shootin peices of delrain down the barrell.

i know a lot of peole who would have never been introduced to paintball w/o BE. And about 15 people from the automags fan group boycotting BE won't effect any thing at all.

[2UnREal]

Just a FYI guys, our sport wouldn't be where it is if it wasn't for BE. Sure, they make horrible products but for some people that is all they can afford. And look at all the advertisements they do. They get a lot and I mean alot of people to notice our sport.

[Predater]

spyders are 80 bux. thats what all the people i know started using. ill boycot BE because i dont like the company. i dont expect it to really do anything but it maks me feel better by not buying there produckts.

[thei3ug]

The good book of capitalism states that people will buy what they need and want. Do whatever you want, there are alternatives.

But give me a break. Why should I care about them for good or bad? i don't have anything to do with them anyway.

[Panzerr]

What the heck for? Sure, BE produces pretty much nothing but cr@p, but think of it this way-how many people do you know that shot a talon or stingray or some other piece of BE junk when they started playing?? Many people wouldn't even know about paintball, if it weren't for the fact that BE has better marketing abilities than just about every other paintball manufacturer. You don't see automags sitting on the shelf at K-ame Apart or Walmart, do you? I don't care for BE, but why would you want to boycot them? They help our sport grow.

[AllAmericanMag]

I hate BE with a passion (mainly for sueing Odyssey) but I will always love my Proteus.

[raehl]

BE is successful because they do what many paintball companies do not: They act as a BUISINESS. I know it's probably not apparent to most players who don't have the "opportunity" to interact with the various facets of hte paintball industry on a regular basis, but BE is one of the few paintball companies out there capable of conducting itself "above the fray" and consistently acting in the company's best BUISINESS interest as opposed to the personal interests of the people running the company.

I work for a big engineering (computer) company. One of the first things that you learn is that it is *NOT* the best product that necessairly wins. If it were, there wouldn't be any adertising, marketing, sales, or accounting people out there - us engineers would just have a big "best product" fight and that's the one everyone would buy. That's not the way buisiness works, and that's a lesson lost on a lot of paintball "buisiness" people who view their companies more as an extension of a paintball hobby than a true buisiness.

The people in charge of BE don't play on paintball teams, don't work in the paintball media, they work to expand their market share instead of focusing on taking someone elses (thus the wal-mart thing), etc. While others busy themselves fighting for control of the paintball industry, and particularly the tournament sector, BE has focussed on taking control of, and expanding, the paintball MARKETPLACE. I understand that a lot of people are frustrated with BE's success, but that's only because they've had the foresight and will to take the steps to be successful when others have not.

Plenty of paintball companies out there would do themselves a favor if they looked at what BE has done and learned a few things.

- Chris

[MikeCouves]

Very true Chris. Look at all the people that had BE and Wal Mart markers before they got mags and such. Alot of people had bought a cheap marker and cheap stuff just to see if they liked paintball. They did help the paintball community.

Then again I don't appreciate how they bought some of the reputable companies and made the products of less quality. Then again, when BE buys a company, that company expands alot and goes into Wal Mart and Canadian Tire, which is a plus to newbies who don't know where to get all the good paintball gear.

[raehl]

BE is suing Odyssey because they believe Odyssey is violating BE's patent. Patents cost a lot of money to get, on top of the money spent developing the product. If you don't enforce your patents, you're allowing another company to profit off of the money you spent developing the product in the first place.

As for BE doing things like discontinuing colored hoppers and the like - if the return on a separate product doesn't justify the costs in producing it, guess what - you stop producing it, whether it's "cool" or not. If you can cut manufacturing costs, you do so. This is what real buisinesses do.

Now, maybe BE has gone too far and cut manufacturing costs so much that their products are suffering, but remember, at the end of the day, it is NOT necessarily the buisiness objective to make the best product. The objective is to make the most money - which can sometimes be accomplished by selling more lesser product cheaper.

In any case, you're an informed consumer, if you don't like the product, don't buy it. If there's a market out there for better quality products, someone will come along to fill it.

- Chris

[raehl]

The point is that its ridiculous to expect BE to make products for the "serious" paintball player when they can make products for 'everyone else' and be a more successful buisiness, and I have to laugh a little bit whenever everyone gets on a webboard somewhere and implies that BE is evil or something for actually operating like a buisiness.

BE was smart. They shelled out the dough for the company which has the patents on one of the "good" ways to make a hopper. Good move for them, bad move for everyone else who didn't see that value and make the purchase themselves.

There's an interesting trend in the paintball industy as of late - consolidation. Lots of the "little" companies that produced one product are getting bought up to create complete product lines. BE is doing this, Diablo is doing this, etc. This was pretty much inevitable. You're going to see a lot more of the paintball buisiness controlled by people who don't play paintball - and that's a good thing.

- Chris