Ok, hear me out. A lot of paintball players (myself included) occasionally whine about the high rates of fire typically associated with electropneumatics and ramping set at, like 25 bps on today's walk-on fields. We complain about how it discourages movement in favor of more spray and pray. It provides a lopsided advantage to players with the most disposable income. It presents a safety concern. And worst of all, it scares the hell out of little kids and first time players on the receiving end of these monsters while they're armed with rental Tippmanns. A lot of them never come back because huddling inside a bunker that's being hit with 25+ paintballs a second just plain sucks. I see a lot of kids in that situation, especially girls, just stick their rental guns out and surrender simply because of the opposing player's overwhelming rate of fire. They're scared and they're done. Then we wonder why paintball isn't more popular.
Idk, maybe this is just the old man coming out of me, but as much as I enjoy paintballing, it really was more fun back in the day when everyone shot a mech. But every once in a while nowadays, I'll play a game at a field that happens to be 100% mechanical guns because it started sprinkling, forcing all the electro-pneumatic players to pack up quick and go home, then everyone left suddenly has a blast (no pun intended). Makes me wish fields would just ban electros so everyone can keep having this much fun. But you can't do that - it'd be completely unfair towards electro owners who paid upwards of $1000 plus for their gun. It'd also be far too difficult to visually tell the difference between mechs and electros. And it wouldn't stop high rates of fire from bouncing reactive triggers, either. So what to do? I say let 'em bring their electros ramped to 50 bps to walk-on games. Ramp them even higher than that if you can! Anybody got a fully automatic gatlin paintball gun? Bring that, too. But make sure your photo eyes are working properly because you will be leaving your Dye Rotors and Empire Prophecies in the car. This is a SHAKE AND BAKE/ROCK AND COCK ONLY field!
I don't know about the rest of you but I would love to play at a field that enforced a gravity-fed hoppers only rule and disallowed force feeding systems, or at least restricted players with force-feed loaders to their own games away from everyone else. If these guys want to shoot their electros with us, they gotta dust off their old hoppers. Best way to solve the perceived problem of unreasonable rates of fire, I think. Anybody else feel the same way? Or should I just quit my whinin' and go find a pump game somewhere?