Is there by chance any interaction between paintball organizations and airsoft groups? I haven't been in a paintball store lately so I don't know if there is much interaction between the two sports (for example, I don't know if these things are sold side by side with paintball guns). But it seems like perhaps there would be a good opportunity to team up with some paintball groups, both to share or rent their facilities, and also to perhaps to help in organizing the AS community more. Although in the end it might be easier to go your own way, since I don't know if paintballers would view the airsofters as competition. But it might be worth looking into.
There is some cross-pollination between airsoft and paintball. A lot of players cross-over, or do both. It's all a matter of preference as far as I'm concerned. I don't think the two will ever marry though, airsofters like the MilSim aspect and paintballers don't want be considered remotely militant. Airsofters don't like to get paint on their nice BDUs and paintballers don't like to slip on BBs. Stores like
http://www.iisports.com sell both paintball and airsoft.
I would kind of like to try airsoft but I have a major beef... How do you keep track of who is hit and who is out of the game, etc? The plastic BB's just bounce off... What if you didn't feel it? In paintball if you didn't feel a ball hit you or you are trying to cheat, the other player can have a ref check you for paint real quick, without interrupting the game too much. How do you handle such disputes in airsoft? Also often times someone is hit several times and calls themself out just to avoid any more pain.
You know, I was watching an ESPN-televised NPPA championship game back in 1999 or 2000 maybe. One of the players was caught on tape wiping paint off. Now, if a player has the audacity to do that sort of thing on a televised game, you gotta wonder how he conducts himself in a non-televised game. I've played paintball, you've played paintball, you and I both know that simply because a player is hit with paint that it's no guarantee he won't cheat.
In airsoft, we try very hard to cultivate an atmosphere of trustworthiness and honesty. Yes, we do rely on the honor system. You take a hit, you walk yourself off the field. Believe it or not, it works. Rarely do we ever catch a person cheating. I've only ever called two people on it, in the 6 years I've been playing airsoft in the US.
Why does it work?
1) Exclusivity. Teams like the ones I play with actually screen their players before the game. Members or "players in good standing" sign-up to a game online, and are sent instructions to the field 2-3 days prior to a game. Sort of like operational security. "Players of unknown standing" are assigned to a mentor and are watched closely for their first few games. It's like the internet, you can liken an airsoft game to the internet. An anonymous player can walk in, cheat, do some damage and never come back. We take all the anonymity out of the equation. If a player is a known cheat, we have his name, his address, his phone number, and he gets black-listed, which leads me to point #2...
2) Rarity. There may be a dozen paintball fields in a given metropolitan area. But there may only be one commercial airsoft field. A lot of games are hosted by teams on their own private fields, teams tend to inter-communicate and the heads tend to talk to each other. Once a player is black-listed by one team, usually another team will know about it and will black-list that player as well. So what you end up with is a player all decked out to go to war, and no war to fight. Nothing persuades a player to play straight than the threat of never-ever playing airsoft again.
3) Respawn. You guys ever play first-person-shooter, deathmatch games on your PC? You die, get transported somewhere else on the map, wait a certain amount of time, and play again? Well, most airsoft games have respawn rules. This does two things. One is that it simulates a larger force. Fighting 10 players respawning every 5 minutes is like fighting 100 players. The other benefit is that it makes "dying" not a big-deal. You get shot, walk back 100 yards to your designated respawn point, wait 5-10 minutes, go back into the fight. At most, you lose some ground, or a really freaking good fighting position, but you're still in the game (which could last a few hours). You're not done for the day once you get shot. Hell, there's been times in the past where I'm thankful I got shot just so I can go back, have a sip of water, catch my breath and take a break.
4) "Benefit of the doubt." I've had a lot of incidents in the past where I'm thinking, "the guy was like 100 feet away, right in the open, no freaking way I missed him with that burst". But hey, that's airsoft, you give the other player the benefit of the doubt. Maybe he didn't feel it, or hear it, or you missed him altogether, but since we're all honorably trustworthy players on the field you give that other player the benefit of the doubt. The player is not a cheater until you've given him the benefit of the doubt a dozen times and by a dozen different players.
5) No prizes. At the end of the day, the only thing you walk away with is tired feet, an empty camelbak, and your pride. Win or lose, there is pride to be had in playing an honorable game. And that's our sell. We don't need paint to keep people honest, we hold them accountable in an age-old Samurai code. "Death before dishonor" and all that jazz.
And it works. It really does. I've had games with as few as a dozen guys and I've had games with 150 players on EACH side. The few times that it doesn't, we deal with the offender harshly. Our society could learn a lot from how we play airsoft. The key word is
accountability.
Shocking. I don't see a single TF violation in there. I've made enemies on the field for pointing out trigger-finger and muzzle-safety violations.
