the "attitude"

[buzzboy]

yeah, the military image is bad for paintball. so much worse than the e thug, contract killa, face shootin wanna be street gangsta, no respect, no manners, no honor, foul mouthed always cheatin image that is prevalent now.

One of the most true things I have heard in a while[heavy sarchasm]

[White_Noise]

ive actually had a field at my house(full 5-man airfield) that we would have people come to practice on.

sure we had already "made the switch" before this time, but we found ways to keep things under control.

first:

we had a very strict cheating policy. we were hosting team practice sessions, and its really ridiculous to cheat in them anyway, but we outlawed cheating. we even kicked off an entire team and never invited them back for cheating/ disorderly conduct.

second:

we had special safeguards such as a no shooting zone for staging, strict barrel condom/ mask rule, as well as having whoever was not playing at the time help to referee the games.

third:

in general, it was invite only. we would only have guys we knew, or if they wanted to bring someone else, they had to vouch for them until we were comfortable with them.


finally:

everything ran pretty smoothly, we only had the one major problem and it was an isolated incident with 1 team. what you really need to do because it is your field, you have to establish that you are in charge and make people respect you. if not, then let them know that they wont get the opportunity to play on the field that you kindly made.


**EDIT**
figure id add another lil story on to this:

this past weekend at a tournament, one of the players on my sister team was doing really good while at the center 50 bunker. some guys from another team were standing next to me an commented on how he was doing. they couldnt believe me when i told them that this was the first time the guy had even played on a speedball field, let alone in a tournament. goes to show how skills are skills, no matter where you play.

[buzzboy]

I try all those two. My little field is just a practice field for some friends and by invite only. Or at least it used to be. Now random people have been showing up and when I came home from a 30 day vacation I found many of my bunkers destroyed and others moved around quite a bit. That really P's me off.

And you said about kicking people off, at my field the "we" is ME

[bentothejam1n]

yeah, the military image is bad for paintball. so much worse than the e thug, contract killa, face shootin wanna be street gangsta, no respect, no manners, no honor, foul mouthed always cheatin image that is prevalent now.

You know where thats going?? My pbnation (only made it so i could TRY to find a good deal on a sw!tch) signature. ITs gonna be sweet. And I plan on starting flame wars

[Jrhan762]

This is exactly what happened to the group I started with. It was actually a youth group that just got into paintball. The arms race is what killed us. Everybody had to have the most deadly thing on the field. the people with the expensive guns thought they were top s***, they started cheating, built a tiny spool field and gave up woods...I had to get out. There's nowhere to play straight-up recball here anymore. I even got sucked into speedball for awhile but I got sick of being told to play back. I miss going out into the grass and disappearing, instead I'm hauling a** to a tiny bunker and trying to fight two people firing 22 a second off of me while me "teamates" up front scream "WHERE ARE THEY? YOU GOTTA TALK!" Here's an idea. Get out of the fetal position and draw a little heat so I can shoot somebody. One kid at a tourney had the nerve to ask me why I kept getting shot in the first thirty seconds of the game, and I told him "Because I'm trying to kill these b*******, not bore 'em to death!" The general attitude has just gone to crap since I started playing. It just became the 'in' thing to do. This youth group started playing with about a total roster of 30 people, generally getting about twelve to play on a given day...Now they don't even have an exact count, but they think it's somewhere around 150 with about 10-20 on a given day...all this since 2003. what I used to think was a godsend for our town has turned into a plague. kids are totally obsessed with paintball, buying expensive guns and not maintaining them...vandalism has become almost commonplace...All this started from 10 kids playing with Brass Eagle Eradicators (Disposables!) in a basement barely big enough for a one-on-one.