Did HPA kill Outlaw Fields?

[Chuck E Ducky]

Most of us have some property. But we have several yearly team get togethers that involve good food good drinks and some paintball.

But I have to admit we use to play a ton of outlaw however lots of the places we use to play are being developed. Arts old place was a ton of fun back in the day. Dave’s place was super cool with very unique places to play. I started playing Stock Class against a bunch of Electro guys that use to get together at an abandoned cement factory down by the river. They organized through the local paintball shop that ended up burning down. It’s all commercialized and developed now.

Lately it’s been the backyards of Teammates cracking 12ies with the boys.

[Trbo323]

Paintball lost some popularity, it's harder to find people interested in playing. Everything went online so kids these days would rather drop $60 on a new game than a case of paint.

Paintball got (more) expensive and with all the torny try hard basically convincing people that blowbacks are no longer acceptable starting markers it moves the price that even higher. Follow a lot of the torny try hards who have only been playing for 3 years, follow their advice and you spend $500 easy before you hit the field for the first time

When we started playing outlaw we would rent a 50lb co2 tank from a local welding shop and play all day. After a while people started getting HPA only markers and someone got a few scuba tanks so we ran both co2 and HPA out in the woods. My group fell apart more because people went off to college over anything

[$L!mBo]

to circle back to the first post, and elaborate on Welthouse (we'll getcha down there one of these
days Magageddon😁), when we get together for outlaw, 12g and hpa are welcome but we try to keep everything rock n cock feed. aside from my hk36ci+tko, ive always bought hpa tanks second hand, usually paying ~$70 or less for "peanut" and more pump friendly sizes. Im lucky to have 2
nearby fields with fill your own air stations so i can top everything off the day before.
Our spot is woods with tons of stick pile, tires,
and plywood/pallet bunkers BUT setup for fast rounds that dont usually go past 5 minutes. "speedball in the woods except you will probably shoot less than 20balls" is how we commonly describe it.
works out for us and i think its a pretty successful blueprint for modern outlaw.

[Carp]

Have y'all heard about the story of "The learning bot and his "dumb" AI friends". Reddit will tell you all about it in a discord! Bot friend y'all later.... 🙄

[The Hobbit]

I think most of us take the topics at face value and want to interact. Not all of us have as finely tuned botdar.

[Carp]

The Hobbit To me, it is not the fact, that "They" scrape info about PB. It is the false representation, in making their accounts, when here! ...I digress.

[gabe]

-I have fantasized about trying to get a small local group together for some pump-only games. There have been some people around that played, besides myself, and I like to at least imagine that some of those guys wouldn't mind a game or three a year of some not-frantically-paced play. And yeah, if it came down to it, I could outfit close to a dozen players right now if I had to. (Okay, some of the goggles might not be the best, but... )

Doc.

If you end up getting motivated to do this I could probably find some land around the peninsula to do it on. Liability is the tough part, everyone is lawyer scared these days. My parents have some land in Kenai and a big lot on Nikiski we could play on. I'd have to see about waivers.

[Hp_lovecraft]

I worked in a sporting goods store in the 90s, and a huge chunk of the business was outlaw paintball. Mostly entry level.
Early on, 12-grams were a no brainer, mostly for Sheridan pumps
But I remember when the Brass Eagle Stingray first came out... it came with a 12-gram changer! lol. It was a disaster, SOOO many came back as "defective" when it really was just completely locked up with broken paintballs.

I get they were trying to make it viable for outlaw, but that was the wrong solution. Later on, the industry started agressivly pusjing the disposable bulk co2 tanks. But that wasnt really an new idea. I can remember around 92 or so, TASO was selling a minimax/mightymax disposable co2 system.

Really the only thing that worked was renting a bulk co2 tank from a welding shop. They were pretty cheap, apart from the deposit. You didn't need an elaborate fill-station. Lots of outlaw fields used NO fill-station. Just an adapter on the valve. You would fill, remove, chill, refill, remove, weight, drain down to correct weight. Adding a simple remote hose to the fill station meant you could weight while filling.

I saw outlaw places that used upside co2 tanks. lol. Didn't love that. It was also common for outlaw fields to put co2 tanks in ice to "save on co2". good times.
Quite a few sporting goods stores would also fill co2 tanks. Always underfilled. But for outlaw, it was sometimes the only option. Sports Authority was a good one for filling tanks. Lots of Army'Navy stores also filled tanks back then.

But thats all gone now. HPA is a part of what killed outlaw. It adds to the cost, and difficulty, raising the level fo entry for new players. Only a small part. I think paintball has just faded enough where its hard to find enough players to get an outlaw game. They would rather play online games, cheaper and less painful