Someone fill me in...

[jacojone]

I have been out of paintball for a couple years, but after relocating to a new area I am thinking about picking it up again. As I have started looking to buy a new marker I am amazed by how cheap guns are! Cockers are commonly 100-200 dollars, impulses and others are under 250 with considerable modifications, and many other (to me) "high end" electronics are 400 and 500 bucks. When did this come about, and why? For the years I did play paintball prices never changed so much...


j

[warbeak2099]

Here's a quickie. The market got flooded with a ton of used guns because little 12yos sold their gear for ridiculously cheap just to go and get the brand new marker on the street. They didn't care how much they lost because their mommies bought their gear in the first place. So they went out and had their mommies buy the new guns, and sold those after a couple months. Resale on guns has now plumetted.

[craltal]

Smart Parts introduced the Ion and that killed the resale market for just about everything else.

[kruger]

You completly missed the ROF wars. Most markers will shoot stupidly fast now.

[jacojone]

What is the deal with this ion?

I see tons of them for sale, and they appear to be a real electro for fake electro price. I also see a TON of them for sale, are they good guns?

[kruger]

Well, SmartParts made this gun and it has nearly shut out every other low end gun in the market. It is fast, light, and fairly efficient out of the box. There is a tremendous amount of after market parts for it. In fact, you can build an Ion from the ground up with just parts, and never buy a part from Smart Parts They give you high end performance for low end price. Some people like them, others dont. There also was a Patent issue with smart parts, they basically patented the Electro marker and pushed a lot of gun makers out of business, or claimed a royalty from everybody else. Lots of folks got a bad taste in their mouth after that, and wont have anything to do with smart parts anymore. But that is a whole 'nother thread.

[Lenny]

Yeah... Smart Parts...

'Mags are still the best, though. AGD quality hasn't changed. And they've joined the speed race too now with the home converted PneuMags, and E-PneuMags. DevilsMags aren't that common, but not too hard to find. E/XMag lowers are pretty cheap. Hyperframes can be had easily for $200 bux. Then theres always the SpyderMag.

Oh, and did anyone mention to you that Brass Eagle now owns WGP? Seriously, they do. I wish it were a joke.

*sigh*

[68magOwner]

Ions really are nice little marker, espicially for the price. This is, in part, what drove the price down on other markers. Now one can pick up a shocker, dm4, pm5, ion, e-cocker, 2k2 platform intimidator, 2k5 platform intimidator, or many other comprable high end electro markers for under $500. It is really within almost any semi-serious ballers reach to pick up a marker that will perform just as good as the "super markers" of today. Kina sucks for the guys with the $1800 markers, but, still a pretty cool time in paintball IMO.

[Toll]

Depending on when you quit, the landscape has gone completely berserk.

Nice cockers (e1s) top out at 300$ or so max
Ion's (stock) can be had at 100$ and are better than anything produced 5 years ago.
Eyes are common on everything (you will never see a marker without anymore, save for mags)
Dm4's cost about 350 if you can haggle.
Shockers (which I used to consider uber high end when I was young at pb) are commonly going for 450 to 400 on pbn.



Alot of kids with alot of money. Some of the best markers ever are being sold dirt cheap (200$ for a Gen E matrix with Tadao board and all sorts of upgrades...but it has no eyes so no one wants it) but some retain their resale (Vikings, Emags, all the old stuff the agg kids don't want)

[jacojone]

Wow, so crazy. So BE owns WorrGames....have their products gone to poo?

[eNder159]

if you're looking for a good gun to pick up and start playing PM me i have a DM4 for sale

[spectre184]

IMPO the ION did to prices like when Kingman released mech Spyders @ $100. Everyone had to play catch up or loose......

[FARMER00]

lol my cousins paid about $600 for thier stock minimags and put about another $1500 into them (parts cost more in canada) and now u can get a minimag with a better bolt kit for $330. i find it extremely funny

[Lenny]

Wow, so crazy. So BE owns WorrGames....have their products gone to poo?

Yeah, right down the pooper. The Trilogy line isn't that great, and the "redesigned" Black Magic was less than spectacular. What ever. Just buy an old model and you'll be good.

And Snipers ftw! Kinda sorta in the process of building one now.

[Doc Nickel]

Basically these guys have it explained.

About four or five years ago, we started seeing more and more Spyder clones- basically the same gun, but made by a different company, or made by the same company for a different retailer, etc. So you ended up with ten or fifteen cheap blowback copies available.

They started adding what can really only be called "bling" to them in an effort to improve sales- chrome parts, fancy milling, gauges, add on trinkets like sight rails, etc.

Shortly thereafter, we saw a huge wave of E-frames appear. Same blowback gun and cheap construction, but now it had an electronic sear, and of course the requisite cheater modes like full auto and ramping. Prices, however, continued to drop.

So for a while there, you could get a decent, but not great, electronic blowback for under $150. Also keep in mind that all this time, places like Wal-Mart, K-Mart and other big-box stores started carrying not only guns, but masks and paint, and you could start getting prepackaged kits (gun, loader, tank, mask, etc.) for dirt cheap.

Then, two years ago or so, Smart Parts released the Ion, a sort of "poor man's" '03 Shocker, designed from the get-go to be cheap (plastic body, die-cast grip frame, cheap parts) but also quite functional (it had built-in anti-chop eyes, a decent rate of fire, pretty good efficiency, and generally works pretty well) available at the beginning for about $250. Not much more than the better cheap E-blowbacks.

The Spyder clones were already selling by the supertankerloads, and the Ion was seen as a step up from those. Kids sold off the cheap Spyder clones to buy Ions, and even players with better or more expensive guns would buy Ions to have a cheap "beater" gun for either backup or for play on really nasty days (lots of dust, muddy/rainy, etc.)

The price on the Ion has come down at least twice since then, and can now be had brand new for something like $180 retail.

And, as the other fellows pointed out, that cut the knees out from under the resale market. A used Ion is worth maybe $100 if it works, and you can buy parts junkers all day long for $50 a pop. Used Spyder clones, even ones with E-frames, and working, are about the same- $50 to $100, tops, depending on how many goodies you throw in.

Add to that the big retailers' "gun of the week" programs, where they release some "new" version of a marker by giving it different milling or a different anno pattern (IE, the Angel A4, A4 Fly, A4 Rasta, etc. and the twenty different versions of Intimidator that were functionally identical, but had different milling.) This essentially trained the average player that any marker that came before the latest version, was old and slow and obsolete, so there was- and continues to be- a huge amount of turnover during the spring and summer.

Players buy the newest/latest and sell their old one- which might only be four or six months old by that point- typically fora big loss. A gun that started out at $1,200 might barely fetch $600 or $700, and two or three months later, when sold a third time, might be down to $400 or $500.

Look around- you can get Angels for $500, or even "old" LCDs for $250, fully functional. You can get Intimidators that started out at $1,200, for less than $300 today, with relatively little wear and years of life left.

Doc.