(Side note to the nay-sayers: Think you can compete effectively on the arena field without spending the dollars?  Try it.  Please. Restrict yourself to five rounds per second, don’t go through a case and a half per practice, practice from behind wood pallets and tires, enter a major national event and see where you finish.)

Less Expensive To Get Good.

If events are less expensive, it will cost less to compete.  The only way you can get good at paintball is to get your butt-kicked, over and over and over until you’ve learned all of the lessons you need to learn..  The faster the butt-kicking is over, the sooner you’ll become an experienced player with the minimum necessary skill set.
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Please notice that up until this very moment, the cost of paint has not even been mentioned.  It will be now.

A pump player typically carries between 100 and 300 rounds per game and shoots paint at a maximum rate of about 7 balls per second.  An arena player typically carries 600 to 1200 rounds per game and shoots at a legal maximum of 13 (point some ridiculous something) balls per second.

Without even getting into the issue of playing styles and the fact that woodsball is more about movement than it is about shooting, it is easy to see that the pump player can play three or four games with the same amount of paint that an arena player uses in a single game.

If playing time were the only measure of playing skill, the pump player already has a FOUR TO ONE advantage.

You may say that’s stretching it a little – and maybe it is, just a little – but whether the greater amount of play for a pump player results in a little more experience or a lot more experience, the fact remains that the pump player can acquire their experience for less than the arena ball player.

Bonus Section – Cost Basics

Getting into woodsball costs less.
Practicing woodsball costs less.
Competing in woodsball costs less.

In fact, the cost issues parallel the CONTROL issues.  What are the control issues?

Control means – you get to decide what to do with YOUR dollars, YOUR team, YOUR equipment, YOUR time.

Arena ball players compete in a world in which they have become little more than brightly colored billboards.  Regardless of whether you think it looks cool or not, marketing and advertising in this manner costs more money.  Sponsors have to up their costs to cover their sponsorships. Teams have to up their costs to support their sponsors. Events have to up their costs to support the display. (No bleacher rental fees at a woodsball field.)

No one forces a kid to go out and buy an expensive uniform or gun so that they can look like the cool kids playing on the turf – but show me a kid with aspirations of being a big-time tourney guy and I’ll show you a kid who believes that it would be awkward or shameful or exceedingly uncomfortable to show up for play in sweatshirt and jeans, toting an inexpensive entry level marker.

The player buying into this has given up control to the industry.  They may do it willingly, happily, enthusiastically, but they’ve given it up nevertheless.  Someone else decides what the cool colors are this year, which gun is the hotness, what companies are good and which ones aren’t, which events everyone should go to and which ones you should stay away from.

Woodsball players have an historical track record of walking away from bad deals.  At least three times during the history of tournaments-in-the-woods, the players – THE PLAYERS – have walked away from one promoter or another because they felt that they were losing control.

Anyone with a connection to that history knows that the control issue is the main difference between woodsball players and arena ball players.  They know that when they lose control of the game, the game becomes something that is not about playing skill.  It becomes about glitz, and colors, and sales and marketing.

Here is a very important point:  There is nothing wrong with glitz, colors, sales and marketing, nothing at all, but those things are not what paintball is all about.  Paintball is about PLAYING THE GAME.  Playing, playing well, competing in a meaningful way should come first and must come first.  If it doesn’t, the entire exercise is meaningless.

This is why the players – the ones who know what the game is really all about – have walked away from the tournament scene and started up something new three separate times in the history of this sport.  Real paintball players are all about anything that will help them play better.  Not look better. Play better.

They also know this:  when control gets away from the players, the costs go up and the emphasis on the game goes down.  It has always been that way.

Tomorrow – Pump Play Requires More Skill