Who Made That Paintball? | Hacker News Reader

Who Made That Paintball?

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99 pointsfuzzythinker56 comments

What a trip down memory lane!

Growing up as a teenager in the late-90's and early 00's, I went deep into paintball.

A lot of friends of mine today kind of chuckle when I tell them I used to travel and play in a national tournament series, but what a blast it was!

There's great history here. The big American league at the time I got involved was called the National Professional Paintball League (NPPL). The flagship competitions were 10v10 capture the flag, and they also had 5v5.

The NPPL at the time was broken down into Pro, Amateur A, Amateur B, and Novice, with 8 or so tournaments per year culminating in the World Cup in Florida.

There was a pretty exciting ecosystem at the time, with tons of exciting paintball marker innovation happening as markers were making the switch to electronics for the first time with the WDP Angel (a European company), the Smart Parts Shocker, and others to follow.

Not to mention the mechanics of the old non-electronic markers like the WGP Autococker and the Automag. The geeky bits of which would absolutely fascinate all the technical minds of Hacker News.

(for example, check out some of the cut-out animations of the mechanics of some of these old paintball markers. Customizing and tuning and adjusting were a total blast back in the day. Way cooler than pogs! http://www.deadlywind.com/paintball-animation)

I was deep into paintball too in high school and college, nothing national but traveled with the university club to other universities.

It's been a while since I played any serious paintball, but to me the biggest downside at the time was the arms race. Obviously the tippman full auto was banned from competitive play, but after that it was pretty much up to your wallet. I remember getting my Bob Long Autocoker and feeling invincible. Then some guys started showing up with Angels and holy crap I was intimidated. Compressed air vs CO2. Quality of paintballs. Even some of the gear with neoprene to give you a bit more 'bounce' it all added up.

Paintball was the most fun when we started, everyone with a tippman rental.

After our group started diverging on total spend it because obvious it was getting unfair. Eventually we all bought tippman pro carbines and required the same paintballs be used and all on CO2. Not getting CO2 freezing was part of your strategy! We had much more fun after we removed the arms race, even at the expense of not being able to tinker and customize.

The Angel guys could go to pub games and light up the poor schleps if they wanted :P

That's awesome. Were you NCPA?

Funny enough - when I was entering High School around 2002, paintball was in the middle of a big growth phase, and as part of it, the NCPA seemed to have enough traction that there almost seemed to be a chance that players might start to have a hope to get college scholarships to play ball.

Definitely relate to you about the arms race. Though I enjoyed the tweaks to my Autococker including the Eclipse E-Frame, by the time I got out of the sport in '04 or '05, Intimidators and the DM series really took it to the limit.

Technically they were "semi-auto" but were walkable up to 14-15 shots per second and in the X-Ball style play, people were literally going through cases of 2000 in single matches.

Insane price ramp. Crazy to think it all happened within the span of a decade.

It is a small world. I was the president of The Ohio State paintball team for a few years. I also helped the NCPA with a website refresh back in the day. I would have never though that topic would come up on HN.

I spent more money on paintball in college than I care to think about. I has one of the first "new" shockers. It was one of the first red ones, the serial number was below #50 if I remember correctly.

Hah! I actually started playing paintball when I was in middle school in New Albany, Ohio.

Did you ever play at the Splatterdome in Colombus by chance? I remember seeing a shocker there for my first time...

Sadly no, NCPA wasn't around when I was playing. Looks like I _just_ missed it, though I'm not sure if my school was one of the original schools involved, so maybe I had no chance anyways.

I hear you on the tinkering/tweaks, that was extremely satisfying.

For a while, we told all our friends they could only tippmanns, preferably just the 98 custom. Some trigger upgrades were allowed as well as any barrel, no e triggers. It was actually really good, since most people would end with relatively equal equipment, and people wouldn't get pissed off at the new guy going full auto.

I too went deep into paintball back in the late -90's; it was one of the few 'sports' that I really took an affinity to.

Unfortunately, I was shot in my left eye with the barrel being less than 3 feet away, leaving me legally blind in one eye. It was after a game and we all had our masks off.

Being that my main skillset is/was design & web, it was one of the scariest experiences of my life. Fortunately I've continued to build a great career relying on the vision of one eye.

I've been approached a few times to speak out publicly on TV against the dangers of paintball, but have always declined. Just like anything in life, proper precautions are important and freak accidents will happen.

I would love to play again one day, but it's probably not the best idea.

Why did someone shoot you after the game? Was it an accident?

It happens, lax safety on and off the field and poor gun safety/trigger control. Keep your mask on at all times on the field and barrel bags on off the field, and accidents like this can't happen (source: I ref and play paintball every weekend). We kick people off the field for lifting their mask when they are on the field and ensure barrel bags go on before walking back into the staging area.

Total accident. Many of us were all hanging out by the cars and one of the guns went off.

Gosh that's brutal. Sorry to hear it man, glad to hear you're above it both professional and spiritually.

I also feel bad for the person who's marker went off in your face. What a horrible guilt that must be.

I too was very much into paintball in the UK, great times.

What kind of killed it for me was the introduction of semi-auto's and move away from pump action greats like the old Phantom, Sterling range etc.

Found it got down to not how good you were but how much paint you could afford and with that, got silly. Limited paint/ammo tourneys were ok but still, the fun was lost and greatly shifted from skill to who could afford to spray the tree above you enough so you got taken out by Marshall as covered in dripping paint sadly :(

Half the fun was me was tuning your gun and getting it sat just within legal limits and for that syphon tank with my Sterling silver was the best and would get 299, 298,299,299 crony shots, solid with very little variation of 1 or 2 FPS. That with barrel extension was really accurate and great range, but took work to get it that solid and consistent.

Now somewhat easier and in many ways paintball markers technology wise surpassed real life guns in many many ways.

Fun times.

That's awesome. I always respected the old stock games, though I never really got too far into it myself.

Remember looking at Palmer Customs on the web?? Works of art.

http://www.palmer-pursuit.com/

You may want to look into it again. Pump games and magfed is making a comeback.

I'm still pretty into it, although I'm refereeing now on the national tournament series. Its far too expensive and time consuming to travel all around the country and play these events plus practicing each weekend (it's very competitive now, gone are the days of drinking at night and playing hungover). So reffing still allows me to travel to these events and see all of my friends still in the sport (now mostly other ref's or working in the industry at various companies). Plus I get to travel around the country with a group of good friends and still come home with a couple bucks, or at the very least a free vacation!

The big American league now is the Paintball Sports Promotion (PSP) league, the flagship being 5v5 Race-To-7 format. Think very fast paced games and the first one to win 7 times wins the match.

I believe that the NPPL is taking a hiatus for a year, if they come back at all, they've barely been able to stay afloat for a while now. From what I've heard it's been due to poor financial decision making on the leagues behalf.

As far as the markers go, most of them are now based off of the Matrix or Intimidator designs from your link, with a couple using the Hollowpoint design (at least in the tournament series). They've also begun limiting the Rate of Fire in the PSP, being 10.2 shots per second in the professional divisions to remove any advantages of higher prices markers.

All in all its still a pretty cool sport. I've met tons of great people through it, and many life-long friends. Hopefully it gets back to where it used to be in the early 00's, it's definitely been growing the last few years after the hit it took around 2008.

Hah this is awesome to hear. I love this discussion.

>> The big American league now is the Paintball Sports Promotion (PSP) league, the flagship being 5v5 Race-To-7 format. Think very fast paced games and the first one to win 7 times wins the match.

Really interesting. The season I stopped playing, NPPL split into NPPL 7-man, and PSP took the new format X-ball as their flagship, with 10 and 5 man on the side too.

A question I have - from an outsiders perspective, it seems like the sport kind of died down around the time of the recession in 2008 or so. I feel like I stopped seeing as many of the publications on the shelfs at Barnes and Noble and such.

Would you say that's the case? Or am I just an outsider now?

most of what I've since learned to see as 'coke vs. pepsi' arguments I first learned in the form of 'mags vs. cockers'.

vi vs. emacs, chef vs. puppet, mysql vs. postgres, it turns out for the rest of my career the arguments would sound almost exactly the same as teenage boys arguing about play guns with the nouns swapped out.

I was deeply into it as well (though not at your level). I was so happy when a question I asked was printed in Action Pursuit Games (something like should I upgrade to nitro or stay with CO2?).

Also, Automag all the way.

Back in the mid eighties, before the craze really took off I was in a small group who were mostly military and a few off base civilians who spent way too much time and money on this. We had two competitions, standard capture the flag which in some ways probably led to my enjoyment of Doom so many years later and hit man. Hit man was simply that, everyone put their name in the hat and five bucks. Only rules were, you could not shoot someone in uniform or at work. Take the target name from your hit.

Lots of hilarity and some good bruises but those were mostly remedied by disallowing freezing the paint balls. Some really unsettling conversations with local and base police, paint ball guns can look like a gun in the dark and if you alter their color it can lead to problems. Most of us had that old standard green CO2 powered model whose name escapes me.

Speaking for myself, I never even took the hit man game as anything more than fun, we never had anyone freak out about losing. Most took pride in just not getting tagged by the next meeting and i think only once did someone take the pot, it usually ended up as that weeks pizza.

Laser tag was definitely not the same, the primary difference being it doesn't hurt if you screw up.

Freezing paintballs is an urban myth. The hard ones are those that are left out in the sun and humidity the shell absorbs moisture which causes them to "rubberize", they bounce rather than breaking which transferred more energy to the player. Paint made in the 80s and 90s is nothing like modern paintballs, bad manufacturers/brands like Monsterball are long since dead. Safety is still important masks and gun safety prevents 99.99% of paintball specific major injuries. (bruises and small cuts can still happen).

> some good bruises but those were mostly remedied by disallowing freezing the paint balls

Christ, man. I've gotten pretty good bruises using just regular paintballs at regular pressure. We've banned people from our neighborhood games because they would turn up the pressure to get more distance - their velocities were unsafe, and would put a pretty big dent in sheet metal.

The green plastic paintball gun was the "Splatmaster".

I had one of those! I modified it with a metal disc on the back of the cocking mechanism to make it easier on the hand, and put an extended length magazine on there (you had to aim up between shots so the balls would roll into the chamber)

pic: http://www.vintagerex.com/museum/NSG%20-%20National%20Surviv...

I too dropped out at the start of the arms race. Just couldn't afford to keep up.

Yep, we had a bunch of these we rented out at our paintball field when I worked for a small company in high school. It was a blast. Working the "concession" stand (selling paint, renting equipment) wasn't that much fun, but I got to referee an equal if not greater amount of time (our field had a central area with an abandoned building and we can climb on the walls to watch multiple groups).

Also I could play free whenever I liked (off hours).

i had one of those too, it was super fun! my favorite was a clip fed pistol that was really fun, but totally innefective :P

one of my friends who will remain unnamed wanted to play "Force power paintball" one weekend camping, he grabbed a stick and wanted to "test out his force powers" deflecting a paintball. let's just say he's no jedi...

That bit in life where people repurpose equipment in ways the original manufacturers never considered. I hate the term but in this case "thinking outside the box" comes to mind.

What's more interesting is that even the people that "thought outside of the box" didn't think there was any more to it other than a bit of one off fun until they had a massive response from an write-up published in an a magazine.

The interesting point here is that they apparently weren't thinking when they did it... They were playing and observed how much fun it was. I wonder if any amount of thinking or even experimentation could have bridged the gap from the clusters of ideas before and after their original paintball duel.

What a sport, but lately it's been kind of a tragic story. I started playing around 2003, and played competitively in Canada through to what basically became the sport's peak.

In 2007 we were playing division 1 in a league with Impact - they'd later become a pro XBall team - and the first 7-man tournament in that division, we spent $750 per person for paint and entry for the weekend tournament. We shot more than 30 cases (that's 60,000 paintballs). We squeaked by into semis, and then got annihilated.

It made me realize that (a) being competitive at the highest levels of a sport requires incredible dedication on the part of everyone on a team, and (b) nobody would start playing paintball if they knew the endpoint of it was to drop a grand on a single weekend of play.

The dynamics of play got especially rough for new entrants - if you didn't have the gear that let you shoot fast enough and accurately enough to put in someone who was posted on you, you'd get stuck and frustrated. The more paint in the air, the fewer strategic options you had (other than putting more paint in the air), and the more prohibitively expensive the sport got.

I still love the sport but it set itself up to die the moment there was a recession, which, of course, came in 2008.

As someone who also played competitively, I can agree it was the money that drove everyone from the game. Unlike all my other hobbies growing up that I grew out of, this became a financial choice without question. Ordering a palette of paint because our local practice field would let us bring 1-1 was a common occurrence.

God, I forgot about buying palettes. Later on when I started playing Xball it got scary how fast a team could go through one.

How much is paint these days?...i played in 2004, 2005 and I remember paying around $80 for a case (2000 rounds if i remember correctly).

Still about the same $40-$80 for 2000. When we would order palettes, 2001-2006, we would do it because it would bring our cost down to about $20/case. It was all practice paint so it had some obvious defects and wasn't anything we could use in tournaments.

Why don't they limit the rate of fire of guns in games to limit the financial ruin?

They started to, eventually. I think there's a 10 balls per second cap at the lower divisions of one of the bigger US leagues. But in most of the leagues I was in, there were no ramping modes - you'd just shoot as fast as you could, which was rarely more than 12bps.

Any rate of fire lower than that and it changes the game pretty dramatically.

They do, most tournaments have rate limits of 12-15 BPS now.

Anyone notice a downfall of paintball after the 2008 recession? I think that era was the peak in terms of innovation and public participation (I'm pretty sure NPPL was broadcasted on ESPN/Fox).

As some other people already pointed out, Paintball is just too expensive for a lot of people. I really wish I could play again regularly, but I don't have the money for it.

It got to the point when I was playing that everyone was using $1200 guns and at that point my $200 marker isn't really much fun anymore. I think the increase in tech and cost of markers cause a lot of people to be turned off.

Ah, memories. Hanging out on pbnation, talking shop about the latest markers and modifying the ones you had. Funny scene, I can imagine it has changed since I stopped (early 00's).

Paintabll was the first technical interest of mine that inspired me to put my business hat on; I very quickly realized I could make money fixing, upgrading and maintaining other people's markers. Was tons of fun. Smart Parts was my specialty, Karnivore my favorite marker... oh the days!

Too much damn $$ though.

Paintball was fun but can lead to scarring. I got a scar on my bicep from one, it finally faded 10 years later and another one, my 2nd time playing.

I covered up much better but got hit on the finger and received a ball-shaped scar (it also faded since then). I don't think it's common but possible if you have thin skin.

That being said, I don't think it's a great idea to increase the pressure on the gun.

I've had airsoft rounds get literally stuck in my arm before to the point where I had to pry them out (which absolutely left me with scars).

I'd actually never heard of anyone getting scars from paintball- something I always attributed to their greater surface area on impact. I guess I'm not surprised but I am glad the 100+ paintball hits I took never left a serious mark.

I played paintball only once and managed to get shot square in the throat. It didn't leave a scar, but it did bleed a little bit, and freaked me out a lot at the time—for a few minutes anyway.

I've also experienced getting nailed in the throat with a paintball, and for a real brief time I got worried that it damaged my windpipe. The other most painful hit I took was right in the "webbed" part on the hand in between fingers - my hand locked up in pain!

Always wondered: why do paintball guns look like they belong to Spaceman Spiff, while Airsoft (another paintball-style sport using plastic BBs) rifles are models of real military weapons? Is this a reflection of the psychology of the participants, or a necessity due to the different ammo requirements?

You've basically answered your question. It is possible to get rifle themed paintball guns (the rifle from "Aliens" is popular), but they don't add much except weight. Since the ball are delicate, the ammo has to be top loaded to fall into the chamber. It's basically a combination of physics and practicality. If you're going to run and sprint for a couple miles, weight becomes the enemy.

Airsoft has running; weight is still an issue there. I don't see that as an important difference

From what I understand (Paintball player, never airsoft) people who want to play airsoft are usually lumped into the category of "milsim" where it's tactical and basically recreating police/military tactical maneuvers. "Paintball" which you mean as speedball, is a much faster paced and flashier game in the sense that style is definitely a factor in the decisions being made because the field of play is wide open:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4jXOhH_oiU

BB's are mostly propelled by a pocket of air from the chamber and typically backspun via hop-up, while i'd say most paintball markers are launched by a physical bolt slamming into the paintball and driven out of the barrel normally (with the exception of tippmann's flatline barrel)

Psychology and this whole milsim thing aside, some of the tech driving the airsoft/paintball 'guns' reflect their country of origin.

In asia, access to HPA/co2 tanks isn't has widespread as North america, hence a lot of the gas guns are powered via common consumer sources like propane and duster gas.

Airsoft guns that use a MCU (most built on top of MOSFET units) has only recently appeared in airsoft, while pretty much every electronic paintball gun has been the case since the 90's (mostly due to solenoid control), which is also a huge factor to the design.

> most paintball markers are launched by a physical bolt slamming into the paintball

This would destroy the paintball. The bolt loads the ball into the chamber, but actually moves backwards when fired to load another ball. The ball itself is propelled down the barrel by compressed nitro or CO2.

http://www.deadlywind.com/paintball-animation

The cost with paintball is prohibitive though. Now that every paintball marker is set up to shoot 25+ ball per minute you spray away a lot of money during a full day.

Almost no field allows you to shoot 25 bps. Most are limited to 12-15 bps and 300 feet per second or less. Cost is ultimately up to you. We have plenty of recreational players that come out spend $20-$40 for 5 hours of fun. I really depends on the field. Find one that caters to recball and you will have a good time for the cost per hour.

It's been a while since i played so i haven't been up on the technology but...how is it possible to cap the bps? Is that an "honesty rule" or do most of the mid-high end markers let you set bps now?

The high end ones can set the BPS in the electronics (usually in the grip).

Yeah it is definitely a recball vs speedball division.

I remember playing a game very similar to paintball back in the 1970s. One of the other participants has written about it on her blog: http://www.chicagonow.com/soapbox-momma/2014/06/my-friends-a...

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