Paintball

I just got back from playing paintball with Andy and few other people. I don’t think I’m going to do it again. Near the end of my time playing one of my teammates plugged me in the stomach from about 4 feet away, when I was trying to walk off the field because I had been hit by the other team. Not fun. It was also getting too hot, and I started getting light headed.

Here’s the thing - the whole game is “find somewhere to hide behind, then wait until someone goes out into the open, then shoot them”. In an FPS, that’s called camping, which is almost universally reviled by most game player. Everyone has a gun with a fairly high rate of fire, so trying to reposition is suicide most of the time.

I think I’d prefer the game if it was like this:

1. A very thick, overgrown field, with a lot more cover.
2. All the weapons can fire a single shot before being manually recocked, but they’re more accurate weapons

This turns the game into a skill game, not a “Camp, and wait for other people to be dumbasses” game. In the revised game, you can run out into the open, and if someone is prepared, they can shoot at you, and are more likely to hit you. You can start using strategy - for example, someone could run a fake across the field, drawing everyones fire, which would let other people run for new places while the opposing team cocked their guns. Because there was more cover, it would be safer to move around, instead of just camping.

Addendum:
In talking this over with Amy, she pointed out that a game like I described wouldn’t go through 1,000’s of paintballs, lowering the amount of profit made off of paint. Ah, economics, making everything suck more.