Paintball Journal

I can sometimes feel the distant strains of Autumn on the wind, and am looking forward to playing a lot more in the coming months than I have all summer.

I missed an awesome practice last weekend, because my brother and I bought an Xbox 360. Ah, well. Can’t make to ‘em all. But it would’ve been great - 07 Xball Field set up half an hour away.

Anyway, I spent 4 weeks in a cornfield, I need some time to rest, thus the crappy post tonight.

I’m staying in shape with soccer (twice a day now, oh joy…), and will hopefully be bringing you the excitement from the field very soon.

“Sup’AirBall™ just released a new set of Mini Bunkers. The Classic Mini Can now shows the colors and face of your favorite Pro players.”

What?! Oh, man, wait that calls for a good picture I’ve got somewhere around here…

What the heck are they thinking. No one is going to buy these. Surely we aren’t that dumb…

Well, having seen some of the crappy footage of DDay 07, I was more than elated to hear that One4One is making a documentary covering the big parts, with awesome interviews and great footage.

I pretty much really want to see the second half of it. Though, that bit in the middle for BT was rather annoying. Ah well, can’t have free videos without some money flowing from somewhere!

Sweet! Even though the score editing looks a little shabby, I am assured the TV version is edited correctly to show Penn State instead of Purdue. I like the camera angles and the commentary. Best TV paintball I’ve seen yet.

Wooooww!!!!

I knew it was coming, but I’m already impressed. This gun looks so sick!

Supposedly it has 6 o-rings in the entire gun, and will run for about $500-$600. I seriously want one. Now.

I’ve been a big hater of side-line coaching for quite a while now. But I recently read something that really got my attention. First of all, when coaching by spectators is prohibited, one person can make a lot of difference, screaming out a position. The players can hear and possibly choose to react.

However, what if it was completely allowed. The crowd noise would be crazy, and the shouts kind of mangled. I can just see players getting all screwed up because of it. There’s also an unintended side-effect - counter coaching, actually attempting to get a player killed by telling him to move.

Interesting. I’m still not a fan, but it does put a bit of a new light on coaching…

Oo la la! Finally, JT has a new website up and running. All I can say is, it’s about time! That old website was uhm… slightly outdated. Three years ago.

Anyway, this new site is certainly ambitious. They have an events calendar, which they claim they’ll put up any event information on, no matter how big or how small. Pretty rad, but I doubt anyone will use it.

The team section looks like a more useful tool, sorting out the sponsorship details and such with JT. Ditto with the dealer section. With reasonably constant updates, these will be very useful.

The part that I am most excited about is the new stuff section, all about the gear and news that JT is pumping out. It’s all very shiny and flashy and such, great cure for my constant web multitasking. Very cool graphics and such. A sucker for good advertising like me is pretty much screwed.

The photos section is awesome, of course. Like JT would post anything but the best in there. Great stuff to look through.

That’s about it, overall a great new look for a (mostly) great company. (I’m looking right at you, Tac-5).

From PBStar:

We know nothing about this gun other than the pictures you see here. It may or may not ever be produced. But it’s pretty interesting to say the least. From the pictures you can tell it has the hopper integrated into the gun, which should make it much smaller, and be more balanced.

The gun is electronic, has an LCD screen on the rear of the grip frame and a unique hopper that appears to load the balls in through a rotary (ie. revolver) chamber.

Will it ever be made or is it just some company’s attempt at a new far out concept? No idea. But before you start lamenting the lack of creativity in paintball, we wanted to let you know there are some very interesting and creative things happening behind the scenes.

Any tech savvy people out there care to break down the design, at least from the photos? How do you think it works, and what do you think of the concept?

Before you jump all over the photos talking about how ugly they are, please understand that protypes and initial designs rarely look good, especially when they have alien space pods for hoppers. Once you get a working model up and going then you refine the design by making it look nice, starting first by removing the space pod hopper.

Looks interesting, but kinda useless. If it ever does become a gun, what does it offer besides novelty and a slightly smaller profile? Nada.

Sorry for not updating on Friday! I was a bit taken with Harry Potter events and such.

Here are the scores from the Millennium event taking place across the pond.

CPL
1st - Joy Stockholm
2nd - Moscow Phoenix
3rd - London Nexus
4th - Marsielle Icon

SPL
1st - Budapest Bullets
2nd - Brussels Crossfire
3rd - Birmingham Disruption
4th - Chilli Peppers Riga

Division 1
1st - Electrons
2nd - Orbero Malicious
3rd - Royal
4th - Conxion

Division 2
1st - 7eme Compaigne
2nd - Grin
3rd - Fe
4th - Xtreme Paintball

Congratulations to all the teams. Although I am entirely unsurprised that Joy took first.

From Scenario Dreams:

ION T-Boards are discontinued…In one of the most difficult choices I’ve had to make, I’ve decided to discontinue the ION T-board. In the past months, we have had an increase in manufacturing cost, parts cost, and other FEES required to put this product on the market. And its now gotten to the point that I have to stop selling them. Obviously there are certain aspects of this choice I cannot discuss, but believe me when I say I did everything I could to continue selling these. However, we will continue supporting the ION T-board until such time as we run out of replacement parts (which we have LOTS of). And we will continue selling our colored ION eyes and Broken Barb repairs. Plus we have a new Universal T-board that will be able to be installed in any marker and will offer installs for those that are not able to install it themselves. Again, I regret to have to do this, but I had no other choice.
Damon Williams

Common sense and speculation points toward Smart Parts’ recent push to enforce their patent on electronic paintball marker boards. Examples include the licensing agreements Virtue and Dangerous Power made with Smart Parts to protect themselves. It’s really unfortunate that something like this has to happen. Just one flaw in a massive series of flaws that plagues paintball today.

Pacific Paintball is pleased to announce the acquisition of Paintball 2Xtremes Magazine, the preeminent paintball industry magazine. “Pacific Paintball is dedicated to building the finest media based company in paintball. We are a one stop shop for anyone who wants to market to the paintball world,�? said Shawn Walker, President of Pacific Paintball. “Now with the industry’s top magazine - Paintball 2Xtremes, the greatest Paintball Tournament Series in the world - the NPPL, the highly successful regional league - the XPSL, the popular live tournament web cast - NPPL Live.tv, the upcoming paintball television series airing on Fox Sports Net beginning this October, Pacific Paintball is uniquely positioned to provide industry and non-industry advertisers with a variety of media opportunities that reach paintball’s highly sought after audience and to continue its leadership role as a key supporter of the paintball industry.�?

Paintball 2Xtremes Magazine (PB2X) was established in 1996 by John and Mike Henry and later purchased by National Paintball Supply in 2000. John Amodea, who was brought in as the magazine editor in 2000, will continue to serve as editor-in-chief of PB2X. Cheryl Amaya, Publisher of PB2X, said, “We are very excited about joining the Pacific Paintball family and about their desire to continue to grow PB2X. We are also pleased that all of our current management team will be staying with the magazine. This will allow us to continue to provide our readers with the best coverage of all aspects of paintball including; scenario ball, recreational ball, tournament play, professional teams, technical reviews, market news, and local coverage.”

Mr. Walker added, “We plan to invest significant time and resources into PB2X to increase all aspects of the magazine’s offerings, which readers will see over time. The transition will be seamless, with the October issue the first under Pacific Paintball’s management.�?

Pacific Paintball was formed by Pacific Merchant Capital (“PMC�?), a Santa Barbara, California based investment group. The principals at PMC have owned/operated middle market radio stations as well as built several niche media companies, including the largest taxi top advertising company in the United States, which is currently an integral part of Clear Channel Communications’ outdoor division. In addition to Pacific Paintball, PMC is currently building Brite Media Group, a leading alternative media business.

This is an interesting proposition. Hopefully, this will not skew PB2X’s view towards the NPPL too terribly much. I look forward to the October issue when I can see what changes have been made through the new ownership. I must admit, however, that I already have my reservations. Change is baaad…

Here they are, folks! The final scores from Boston! Congrats to all teams that participated, and much envy to all of you that attended.

Pro
1st - San Diego Dynasty
2nd - Los Angeles Infamous
3rd - Stockholm Joy Division
4th - Pittsburgh All Americans

Semi-Pro
1st - SA X-Factor
2nd - SD Aftermath
3rd - Boston Paintball
4th - Redz Infamy

Division I
1st - Rock-It Kids
2nd - Naughty by Nature
3rd - Dynasty Entourage
4th - Miami Devious

Division II
1st - SCP Epic
2nd - NeX
3rd - Splat Kids
4th - STD Factory

Division III
1st - FYT
2nd - Team RNT
3rd - Air Assault Factory
4th - Storm Riders

True to their name, I had never even heard of UKS until today. I was shuffling through PBNation’s video thread, when I saw a thread with over 12 pages of posts. Figuring that it was either a really crappy video or a really great one, I clicked on the link and well…

If you watched that, then you’ll be more than excited by this:

Good luck for the rest of the season, UKS! I know it’s pretty much impossible to reach your goal now, but keep it up and I bet you could at least place 1st in an event. So far they’ve been placing in the 20’s, with a 22nd place finish for Boston.

As many of you know, NPPL made a deal with Fox to produce a series and broadcast it on national TV. Well, that deal had a little bit of a clincher to it. Exclusivity rights for Fox on the center court, where a lot of the bigger games and pro games occur.

Why we are closing the NPPL Forum and blocking the NPPL web cast

Sometimes you just have to take stand. This is one of those times.

We just learned that our friends from Monkey with a Gun and all the other paintball filmmakers have been locked out of center court for filming during the entire Boston event.

The short story is that the NPPL President has cut a deal with Fox to put the event on TV but this deal excludes all of the paintball filmmakers from access to the center court. They can film all the other courts just not the center court. All of you know how important the center court is to a NPPL event. This is the first time in many years that the hard working, dedicated individuals who promote our industry with great paintball films have been locked out of filming on the main field.

This season many of you have noticed that we have greatly reduced our coverage and support of the NPPL series and now we feel that we have to completely end our coverage and support of this series.

Enough is enough.

So to that end we have placed the live broadcast sites, the home page and others on the swear filter and we are also going to close and lock the NPPL forum in a few days.

We hope that you will understand and support this decision and also voice your opinion to the owners and management of the league so perhaps things can be turned around.

As always your continued support is greatly appreciated.

Thanks
Ed
President
PbNation LLC

Thoughts?

Mine are fairly varied. Fox was well withing its rights to want and claim the exclusivity. Really it’s SOP for any big company like that. Unfortunately, paintball is a fairly unique sport in that smaller companies create DVDs for people like you and me to watch. And I really, really enjoy those DVDs, and anything that affects them is certainly something to watch for. However, this could also just be the first step toward where the NFL is today, selling some games to different networks. It’s a bold move by NPPL, but there may come a day when we have to accept the benefits of coverage like this over the detractions such as a void that MWAG and DerDer have filled until now.

The layouts and schedule for NPPL’s Boston event have been released on their site, as of today. The Angel field looks crazy, and I like the snake on the Chronic as well. The event starts tomorrow, so be sure to look on NPPL.tv for live coverage of the event all weekend.