Where did AGD go wrong?

[Nobody]

Now SP did a few things great. 1 was making you the consumer feel that you needed this or that part or gun. At the point of circa 2003, the Impulse was the it gun. You had dozens of private label guns, multiple part houses adding in their own mark and part to the mix.when you build in that need of not only needing the gun to be completed (impulses came without a LPR, which every stacked tube electro needs to set hammer/rammer pressure) but people could put personal pieces to make their guns more unique. Throw that in the marketing of and high profile of many pro teams sponsored by SP using it (and subsequently the later SFT & NXT shockers/ the poor Nerve never found a niche) was paramount of them making their mark and even trying to dominate the market with their lawsuit.

But the main point is, they had marketing. Whether it was paying for teams to use their guns, having many companies provide guns, parts and exposure. Looking back 12 years ago, you had multiple base, special editions, limited editions, private label, and most importantly the fields/proshops wanting to cash in on them by having those guns and selling them down the line. It was the underground marketing that AGD could never get. Mags were never flashy, never had the PL versions, never had the extensive aftermarket part path that some guns had. Being the thinking man's paintball gun, all the technology was buried in a single tube, all within a valve. It also didn't help that even though the L10 eliminated any chopping (the bane of all mags, preceived and actual) the main point of any RT/RTPro/Emag/Xvalve was the reactivity enabling the guns to sing way passed the 20bps range without the aid of any cheater boards.

Regardless of what the pros shoot, the basis of all paintball is the woods. The TacOne bodies gave the people a place to put whatever on them, the key to any woodsball gun has been 2 things: weight and efficeincy. Lugging around an Emag, or an Xmag with a warp, or a classic loaded up, gets tiresome very quickly. Ask beemer about his warps at LL8 and when he used Dayspring's Etek. And when you go into the woods, or just a field, its what are the people using. That is the biggest influence on what people will use/buy. Year's ago, i played some 3 man speedball tournaments. 1 year there were all kinds of Timmys used because the Pev and their(at the time) 7 proshops all stocked & used timmys. A few years later and they switched to Egos. Mags rarely had that benefit.

You can also add in the slow move from powerfeeds to centerfeed/aluminium bodies, lack of R&D on seeing what or where the game is moving. I really think that if TK would have found a Face for AGD that TK could have moved to solely the technical aspects and had the face do the promotion. Then the next smaller Emag could happen, the next developments could be made, hell even a factory pneumag. Alas, that could never happen.

[Nobody]

i think it was a poor decision to try and make a stand alone E-trigger for an automag, and preserve the backwards compatibility. the direct acting noid, and thus massive battery needed to power it ... it might have been fine for a late 1990's electro, but by even the year 2000, it was outdated. a wiser course of action would have been to totally revamp the automag valve, ditch backwards compatibility and make a true electro-pnumatic triggered blowforward gun, with eyes. such a gun was probably in the works, but the above "we have capital to do one thing, defend ourselves from SP, or make a new gun" dichotomy got in the way.

I'll take a stab at this.

1) at that point, there was no R&D for a new valve nor should there have been. The valve works well, add in the L10 l, which is near something no one else has, there is no need the deviate from the line when there is not a problem.

2) remaking the valve and/or the gun line, to a better marketing is hindsight. We are coming from what history laid out not at the precipice of staying the course. The real forward push of lighter was just starting but never gain ground. Look at cockers, angels, shoebox shockers, and see that the mag was not the heavyweight in that crowd, but all of those guns (except the shocker which was ditched completely) did get smaller and lighter in their lives. You can not do that to a mag without a major redesign, which is time and money.

3) a redesign is thoroughly stupid. Its not the package that is the problem. Look at the cocker/ressurection, other than simplifying the internals and changing/bulletproofing the pneumatics, the only thing that really changed is the appearance. You hold a 98 cocker up to a 2016 ressurection, they are the same in looks. The pneumatics are in the same place, and most parts are even interchangeable. But its the marketing of it, its the preceived notion of freahness, and a impressive support system that thrusts the cocker back into the mainstream that the mag sorely lacks & needs. The ressurection didn't change the cocker, it only fixed the problems, updated them to today's simplier player.

[blackdeath1k]

∆∆∆∆. And that is why marketing was my #1 reason. Companies time and time again prove marketing can sell a crap product any day of the week over a quality product that isn't marketed. Especially in the days before modern internet.

[Spider-TW]

Spider-TW,

Sure, it's futile in the sense that no response within this thread is ever going to change the past, and the lessons here aren't a guarantee regarding future business decision-making (is anything?), but it's apparent that some people still find the topic interesting and want to talk about it. TK may or may not have any regrets, but some AGD fans are still confused as to how or why such a good product wasn't more... I don't know... successful? Why AGD products aren't still mounted on display walls in paintball shops across the country. Other AGD fans have their own ideas -- some wrong, some plausible -- but the whole point of this thread was to get people to share what they think.

Right. So, there seems to be two main themes. One is that AGD did not deviate from its fundamental designs enough with regard to quality, robustness (3k regulators), and parts compatibility. Second is the lack of early electro designs and/or failure to fully accept a non-hybrid design.

My point is that "back in the day" only a small market that read APG magazines and such were looking for a great paintball gun that worked every time you pulled the trigger and that shot consistently. Chronographs preceded automags and the CO2 markers were awful for competition. There was also zero "body of knowledge" to say (for instance) about how much pressure and volume of air a marker needed to deliver per shot and how fast can you move that. You can find pretty good guidelines for that now, if you're not looking at a successful marker already. After AGD worked through up to the level 5 and beyond in refinements, there was nothing to say that a different design would prove out as well.

On electros, solenoid valves and electronics were just getting practical. If you wanted to have one reliable marker, it wasn't going to be straight up electro-pneumatic.

Something you should also consider is; "what did SP do correctly?". Other than patent squatting, they were selling a lot of stuff. Instead of containing and working at high pressure, they just brought it down and let the marker fail if something went wrong. They designed for product failure and promoted hard. They would sell you two half-reliable markers so that you could play 70.7% of the time. It's not a business of engineering nor production, but of sales. Engineers just became a necessary "cost center" for them. It is easy to see why a talented person may not be interested in playing that game (they don't have to).

I see the parts compatibility and modularity as a unique and exploitable feature, with small run CNC and 3D printing making a lot of interesting possibilities. With a little more luck, we will have a reliable electro mechanical frame. But if any of it is going to be "big", it still needs a twitter account and some hot models.

[ghost flanker]

Spider-TW,

Sure, it's futile in the sense that no response within this thread is ever going to change the past, and the lessons here aren't a guarantee regarding future business decision-making (is anything?), but it's apparent that some people still find the topic interesting and want to talk about it. TK may or may not have any regrets, but some AGD fans are still confused as to how or why such a good product wasn't more... I don't know... successful? Why AGD products aren't still mounted on display walls in paintball shops across the country. Other AGD fans have their own ideas -- some wrong, some plausible -- but the whole point of this thread was to get people to share what they think.

[cockerpunk]

I see both sides on this comment. Borderline flaming? Yup. But in reality he's also right - you can't assume that somebody cares about what you (or anybody else for that matter) thinks about a subject.

where did i assume anyone cares what i thought?

care or don't ... no skin off my back.

thread asked a question, i answered what i thought. as any member of AO is free to do (last i checked).

[Spider-TW]

Seriously? Don't be so disingenuous. Whether he's right or not is besides the point. Cockerpunk said nothing wrong or provoking here. Big Evil went out of his way to pull a dik move that was intended to instigate a fight on this thread, not to divulge some insightful fact about skepticism. Would you be defending that comment if it were cockerpunk who had written it, instead?

OH! You're looking for an argument! This is "Abuse". "Arguments" are down the hall.

There have been a few large arguments around here over the years that you only see little bits of, either pruned away by various parties or bled over from other forums. Some bled over to other forums.

"I think" it's pretty futile to second guess the decisions made fifteen to twenty years ago as poor or unwise. There may be some applicable business lessons in it all, but you would build your own trap by trying to guide a decision today by 20/20 vision of the past ("past performance is no guarantee....)." While SP pooped on the industry during that period, TK has never struck me as a regretful and sad panda.

[ghost flanker]

I see both sides on this comment. Borderline flaming? Yup. But in reality he's also right - you can't assume that somebody cares about what you (or anybody else for that matter) thinks about a subject.

Seriously? Don't be so disingenuous. Whether he's right or not is besides the point. Cockerpunk said nothing wrong or provoking here. Big Evil went out of his way to pull a dik move that was intended to instigate a fight on this thread, not to divulge some insightful fact about skepticism. Would you be defending that comment if it were cockerpunk who had written it, instead?

[Dayspring]

I understand you don't like cockerpunk, probably for good reason, but I think you're out of line here. If you think his argument is flawed, then by all means address it. But comments like this make me feel uncomfortable about being on this forum.

I see both sides on this comment. Borderline flaming? Yup. But in reality he's also right - you can't assume that somebody cares about what you (or anybody else for that matter) thinks about a subject.

[ghost flanker]

Never assume anyone cares what you think :P

I understand you don't like cockerpunk, probably for good reason, but I think you're out of line here. If you think his argument is flawed, then by all means address it. But comments like this make me feel uncomfortable about being on this forum.

[Spider-TW]

^

[going_home]

[Dayspring]

The answer is multi-faceted, and requires some business acumen, a knowledge of some history and the mistakes Tom K made. Having been one of AGDs largest dealers by yearly gross sales/volume at one point, and having some business sense, its not too hard to recognize.

There is little point in saying more, its spilt milk and water under the bridge at this point. The bell cannot be unrung, it cannot be undone.

Any more cliches?

[RogueFactor]

The answer is multi-faceted, and requires some business acumen, a knowledge of some history and the mistakes Tom K made. Having been one of AGDs largest dealers by yearly gross sales/volume at one point, and having some business sense, its not too hard to recognize.

There is little point in saying more, its spilt milk and water under the bridge at this point. The bell cannot be unrung, it cannot be undone.

[Sandman]

One point I forgot to mention about AGD and moving forward is the commitment of time. Right now AGD doesn't produce a living for anyone. It is a part time endeavor. All the people working in the community Like Luke, BE, Cougar, Xmag, Tuna and myself at AGD all have to earn a living. Well I assume those guys do unless they are independently wealthy. I for one am not. Luckily, I am in the paintball business full time and working AGD into the formula is much less costly for me as it shares into overhead that is already covered. Dave is local and close to me and he can visit and we conspire almost everyday on getting parts and taking steps to move forward. It's not an easy task anymore working within the budget and time constraints that we both have. But we are making progress. We appreciate all the support.
Thanks!
Tim
Sandman