AGD Defunct???

[tonybhall]

Different world

Hey Guys,

I guess I must live on a differant planet than everyone on this board. I live in the B'Ham Al area and play mostly at Paintball Quest. Mag's are making a serious come-back here. They have been the talk of the paintball world that I live in for the past 6 months or so. The field owner shoots and promotes mags heavily. The field team, Phantom Regiment, has several players that shoot Mags. One of Phantom Regiment's 3-Man teams is named for their Mags (Team Mag Daddies). The three of us shoot the new RT Pros and we hold our own with any team with Angels or Timmys just fine. I've never felt out gunned with my RT Pro.

I played a little Rec ball at Quest about a month ago and there were about 50 people playing that day. I counted 10 playing with mags of various types. There was even a brand new X-Mag on the field. I gathered most of the Mag owners together on one team and we dominated play for most of the day. That sure got some people talking.

The fact is, Mags are great markers. There reputation in this area is why I bought mine. Long live the Mag!!!!

Bryan

[Paintcheck200]

Originally posted by AGD


All of our customers own other guns.

Not all of your customer own other guns. Including me, and I'm rather disturbed by the role that AGD has decided to take in the paintball industry. Its clear to me if I was to invest in another marker it would not be a MAG. As much as I've liked your product, I'm not about to invest on a product that is ran by a company with an unclear mission and lack of influence in the industry.

[MaxPowers]

REMEMBER:

[SIZE=3]IN TK WE TRUST

[shartley]

Originally posted by Paintcheck200
Not all of your customer own other guns. Including me, and I'm rather disturbed by the role that AGD has decided to take in the paintball industry. Its clear to me if I was to invest in another marker it would not be a MAG. As much as I've liked your product, I'm not about to invest on a product that is ran by a company with an unclear mission and lack of influence in the industry.

[cgrieves]

I find it very weird to see all these people worrying about whether their Emax/XMag will suddenly become "a dinosaur" due to AGDs recent announcements. Why should your marker become any worse just because the product line is changing? Has my X-Mag trigger suddenly become unusable because the line is discontinued? Is it suddenly capped at 10bps? Will all my balls curve away uselessly? No- the marker performs just as well as it did yesterday. Spares will still be available, technical support will still be available, the marker will still shoot beams of paint. If anything, my X-Mag will now become even more exclusive from now on. The only people who are losing out are those who will be too late to acquire one! Just because AGD makes an announcment does not mean "Sell all your shares!"

To me, AGD has always been the marker company that let it's products do the talking and has not involved itself with the hype that surrounds this industry- they let us make up our own minds and our own myths. For that they have always had my admiration, and I will continue to use Airgun Design products until something with better proven performance becomes available.

I would expect to see a radical product from Tom. A trigger is just a device to communicate with some sort of valve to propel a paintball, and there are many ways other than electronics to achieve this- air can be analogous to electricity in the functions it can perform in a "circuit".

My prediction will be a super-light trigger unit that actuates a low pressure air "relay" which in turn activates a brand new high pressure valve design. Starting from scratch with a new valve removes several of the compromises that AGD have had to pursue in order to keep the "old" valve in touch with today's needs. For instance, the Level 10 bolt (which to me has always been a magical and inspired engineering solution), has to retrofit to the existing valve design. With a new valve design AGD will have free reign to design it with better performance- i.e. make it more sensitive to paint and more gas efficient. I have been scratching my head over the last few days with regards to ACE technology, and if it is necessary, I believe there could be a few ways to achieve it mechanically.

I would expect this new deisign to be expensive however- the tooling needed would be complex. As Tom has always said- quality comes at a cost if it is to be readily available.

Despressing times? Far from it- I think these are exciting times!

[11_Mile_TMaster]

I'd like to take a moment to remind people of something:
AGD Said there were 250 E-mags left when they made their announcement.

How long will it take them to move those? I'm going to bet, at least six months. Hopefully, in theory, that's halfway to the point of this new great thing, whatever it is. Because AOers would not be likely to buy the old E-mags if 'oh, in six months, this cool new dealie will be out, I should just wait for that.'

Not saying that AO is the only market Tom caters to.

Anyway, back to my point, here's a good way to check how many '250' e-mags is... Let's put it this way, Toyotaboy said in september... that his e-mag was in the 1900s. And it sounded like he said it was an E-Max style valve...

E-mag's been around what, almost four years?

2000/~4 = ~500 a year, or so?

250. 6 months.

That's the end of my rant, take whatever you want out of it.

[fallout11]

I also welcomed this announcment.

AGD has collected their information, made some hard decisions, and decided on a path, and are now moving forward.
Sure, these decisions were hard, but they were NEEDED. And like others, I feel, almost overdue.

Shartley is totally correct, and I also support AGD in this move.


I also would not be surprised to see Tom introduce a seriously revolutionary concept in the next few years, that has absolutely nothing to do with electronics.
Such as a fin-stabilized round and new marker to fire them.
Keep watching.....

[hitech]

Originally posted by AGD
One of the big things is the proportion of looks to technology, I still don't have a reasonable assesment of that.

I am probably the wrong one to comment (I'm not representative of the paintball buying market), however I think that one of the reasons that appearance is so important is that performance is about the same across most marker lines. There isn't anything that offers a significant performance improvement. I believe the warp feed did, but MANY people TRULY believe that it did NOT. When you get down to it, what is there to improve on?

[shartley]

Originally posted by hitech
I am probably the wrong one to comment (I'm not representative of the paintball buying market), however I think that one of the reasons that appearance is so important is that performance is about the same across most marker lines. There isn't anything that offers a significant performance improvement. I believe the warp feed did, but MANY people TRULY believe that it did NOT. When you get down to it, what is there to improve on?

I agree with you.

And I think that the only true leap in performance (mind you I am not saying improvement, but LEAP) will come from some other innovative breakthrough. So in many cases it is simply more cost effective for companies to continue tweaking current technology but doing most of the focus on visual appeal.

[hitech]

Originally posted by AGD
Admittedly electros are the rage right now for the fire power, but ask yourself, is it the electronics or the resulting trigger that you really want?

That's easy, the resulting trigger. However, there is a lot to that resulting trigger. The two biggest features are the ability to use "pulling" techniques to achieve insane ROFs even buy slow old men like me. Also, the elimination of short stroking.

Do the same thing with a different method that did not require a battery and "I" believe it would be a big hit. But it MUST so AT LEAST those two things.

[billmi]

Originally posted by Butterfingers
We also seem to forget AGD makes a very competitive Compressed air system...

Thats all Air America Does and nobody seems to speculate the ending of thier business.

That's not all Air America does - that's all they do in paintball - very different. Much like Technicor (AGD's parent company) they do a number of things not directly related to the sport of paintball.

[Muzikman]

Originally posted by AGD

We are trying to ONE, get rid of the Mag name and connotations and TWO, become more focused on fewer products.
AGD

Hmm...I think I can see the future...just last week I said that the only way AGD would pull out of the "Mag Sucks" image is to change the name.


check it out: http://www.automags.org/forums/showt...postid=1305807

[smilestyler]

Originally posted by cgrieves
I find it very weird to see all these people worrying about whether their Emax/XMag will suddenly become "a dinosaur" due to AGDs recent announcements. Why should your marker become any worse just because the product line is changing?

SFL emags have seen upgrades like;ACE, LX, warp breech, X valve, CnC battery cover, and software upgrades. Right now it's great!! But if this is where it ends for this gun, in a few years it will be a rec gun, or a pretty display piece when this technology is ancient.

[deadeye9]

There is only one question:

Is the sale of E/X-Mags profitable (in a net sense)?

If so, then continue their production. Unless you are concerned about retroactive payments for possible patent infringements. This does not preclude the development of a completely redesigned marker (as long as it has a warp breech).

[Gadget]

I think they must be profitable, or they wouldn't have made them in the first place (although I doubt they make much money per marker).

The thing is, although they're selling at the moment, they're not exactly going like hot cakes - and in 6 months time will they sell at all?

There's no guarantee of their continuing saleability.

If it were your money, would you take the risk on spending a big bundle of money to restock the inventory and continue production when:

a) Sales might die out completely at any time, leaving you with $100,000 of inventory which you can only sell one part at a time as spares.

and

b) Continuing to market an electronic marker might leave you open to legal action.

If it were my money I'd be doing exactly what Tom has done. Retire some product lines (particuarly ones that could present a future legal problem), focus on doing a few products well, be careful with my money and look into R&D for future products.

It's the safe route and the one most likely to keep AGD in business in the long term.