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**BretG** · 07-12-2021, 09:40 PM

Nice analysis. You have given this much thought, and I assume you want to apply this to filmed tournament style paintball.
All other filmed sports don't use things to hide behind. Paintball is like real combat in that sense and is difficult to film for the same reasons.
Any war movie is fictional action. I'm afraid the the best scenes must be manipulated to be accurate to the game, giving a true sense of what it is like.
Paintball is just not a good spectator sport. 10 or more players simultaneously shooting at each other is impossible to break down into individual real time actions.
An overhead animated type view is the only way to accurately show the action, and that wouldn't allow individuals to shine enough to become heroes.
Clear masks would only help cinematic close-ups which brings us back to fictional playing.
The best solution I can see to make it better to film and watch, would be to limit the team size to 3 players per side. That would quickly evolve into 2 on 1 or 1 on 1, which would be much easier to record the action.

**vijil** · 07-12-2021, 10:20 PM

TL;DR: You can't show everything, so don't try.
________

You restate some of the objections I've mentioned - but like I say, I don't actually agree that they're insurmountable.

For example - pro CSGO is quite watchable, even though in theory there's nothing about it you couldn't do with paintball. It has most of the same problems for filming. So the assumption that paintball is just bad to watch is more an assumption based on what paintball currently is, rather than what it could be.

Another example - Battle Royale streamers are totally watchable, even though there's 100 players doing independent things in the game, and the same issues with cover and etc.. Why does it work? Because we ignore 99% of what's going on and just follow the story of one player. Paintball needs to not so much focus on one player, but get something built into the game that gives us a player to focus on rather than trying to track everything.

Say for example you take NXL as it stands. Leave the game the same, but:

Get barrel cams for replays
Get clear masks
Get the 3 second feed delay on cameras, allowing the director to better choose which cameras to cut to and when and not miss anything. You don't need to see everything going on - you just need to see the important stuff. Think of NFL where there are loads of people running to different places and doing many different things like blocking and tackling and whatever, but what really matters is the ball. The "ball" is the most important spot at the given moment, which will typically be the furthest forward player. We can create more of a ball too if we design the game better.
- The delay means you *can* do cinematic closeups without missing anything, but you do those *between* points anyway mostly. Also it depends on the pace of the game you're talking about. If it's ten man you can do loads of cinematic stuff because you have loads of time.
Film over the shoulder on one team only rather than trying to cover everything from the side, or trying to cover both team perspectives. Don't worry if you can't see everyone - that just adds to the tension, done right. The teams swap ends anyway, so you get to see the other team do their thing.

That would at least double the watchability even if we didn't actually change the mode.

Then, if we were to change the mode to something with a focal point and which encouraged movement rather than just shooting everyone all the time, we could solve enough of the rest of the problem to make PB at least as watchable as most esports. That's not a high bar. Payload/bunker pushing, centre flag where the pull is worth more than the hang, capture zone, attack and defend where one team gets to respawn and it's timed who can cap the fastest, or etc etc. - it's all been proven to work. Those all create a focal point, meaning, a point around which the most important action happens.

Like, I don't care if a back player shoots another back player. At least, no more than I care that someone off to the side got blocked in football. It's important, but to get engaged with the game I don't need to know it. I just need to know what's happening with the ball. We can do the same, even if there's no physical ball. We just need to stop trying to show everything. Go over it between points with the breakdowns and whatever, but during the action it's not that important.

**Fubarius** · 07-12-2021, 11:49 PM

Originally posted by vijil View Post

Like, I don't care if a back player shoots another back player.

I've pondered this point as well. For me, if something happens I don't care about, then really it shouldn't be there at all.

Strip it down. Way down. 2 on 2. Less sports team now, more wrestling tag team. Really play that aspect up in player interviews before and after the game. Naturally with so few players we're going straight elimination, but pulling off a come from behind victory should be a an exciting and fairly common occurrence.

Each pair will have a designated color scheme, but each player will have a visually distinct uniform. Hire some graphic designers to come up with some cool designs. DO NOT LET THE PLAYERS DESIGN THEIR UNIFORMS. The point is that player John "Maddog" Doe is instantly recognizable from any camera angle and won't be confused for his teammate. This gets us around the not clear mask issue a bit. Been rewatching the old Clone Wars cartoon. With so many characters being literal clones of each other wearing identical full face helmets 90% of the time you'd think developing emotional attachments with the characters would be difficult, but key clone characters had their own stylized uniforms with distinct patterns, making them instantly recognizable. Doing something like this with the players will also give you tons of merchandizing opportunities.

Microphone the players, let them communicate between teammates so it's not an indecipherable yell, and lets the audience listen in.

Remote reffing. You'll have cameras on all the players all the time (since there's only 4 of them on the field). When the booth records a hit have them remotely turn off that players gun. Have a red light flash on the grip or hopper or something. You'll be replaying the hit in slowmo for the audience, better make sure the player doesn't screw it up by not calling out. This means all the guns are electro, but you can then set the rate of fire to whatever works best for the show. Maybe slow 5 bps semi, maybe full auto 15 bps, do some test games and focus group the results with test audiences.

Individual games may end up rather quick, so treat each as a point for a set amount of play time.

Tacticool up the field a bit. Make sure the vibe is at least kind of sci-fi, not 10 year old's birthday bouncy castle.

Bunker design should move the players forward. So low bunkers in the back, with taller bunkers in the middle. Have an open no-mans-land in the middle if players move forward too fast. Ideally you'll want more movement than shooting. If players just camp and "burn lanes" that's just wasted footage. This hasn't been an issue in 1 on 1 and 2 on 2 games I've been in, so it's not too much of a worry.

More later once I sleep on it a bit.

**vijil** · 07-12-2021, 11:59 PM

I partially agree. That said, there's value in having layers of depth. You want the upfront action, but then you want to be able to analyse why the things happened, and see more complexity as you dig deeper. Just like in football or other sports, the number of players on field and the unfilmed action allows this. It gives commentators things to talk about between points, and avoids things becoming one dimensional.

The ultimate take on the idea of minimising things is 1v1. Having more points for a tag when you've moved up was an attempt to add depth and decision making risk/reward play to the ProTour PB thing, and I think it's definitely better than straight DM, but it still lacks the depth you can get from more players.

Another way to get depth with fewer players is respawns, of course. I think we should seriously consider respawn formats in PB, especially alongside objective based formats. It adds depth without adding too much to see. How you tactically work with respawns affects the game a lot - if each player just runs off, spawns, and runs back in, then their team will normally lose in something like overwatch. You have to wait for more teammates to show up before diving in, but the wait cedes territory, and so that whole dynamic is interesting. Do you have unlimited respawns, or limited? Can you sub out when you respawn? How do you force a time delay so players don't just tap right back in, and how do you make sure there's still a good reason to shoot someone? I think it would work.

**DocsMachine** · 07-13-2021, 04:49 AM

That's an excellent analysis, and follows what I've often thought, myself. (Spoiler: Not an expert at playing, video, editing, etc.

)

The biggest hurdle- besides the noncentralized action- is simple cost. Many of the proposed solutions basically mean more cameras, more equipment to coordinate said cameras, more people to run them, experts at on-the-fly editing and scene shifting, and so on. That's a huge extra expenditure- who's going to pay for it?

No one wants to broadcast paintball, even the streaming sources begging for extra content. I realize it's kind of a chicken-and-the-egg situation, because up 'til now, most gameplay has been frankly kind of boring to anyone who isn't an enthusiast, but even still. Paintball is such a niche market that there's simply nowhere near enough real interest to bother broadcasting it.

And without ad revenue, no one's going to pay for those fancy cameras and other gear.

As for different, potentially more video-friendly game formats... actually, yes, we HAVE tried a ton of them. Maybe not specifically for video, and I'm not saying we've tried every possible combination, but really, in the forty years the sport's been around, players have tried thousands of different combinations. 1-on-1, 2-on-2, 3-man, 5, 7, 10, 15, etc. Stock, pump, semi, open or limited paint, limited or open ROF, woods, indoor, CQB, airball... We've tried where peripheral hits don't count, timed games, 24 hour games, one flag, two flags, five flags, no flags... The old ESPN games had a 30-minute event where some of the players couldn't advance past a certain point until X time into the game. (And those bunkers were specifically designed and oriented to improve video angles.)

The base of the game is Player A tries to shoot Player B, within allotted time C. There's thousands of different ways to accomplish that, but really, unless it's 1-on-1, the game will inherently involve decentralized action. And the only way to cover said action is with expensive equipment and manpower, that no one really wants to pay for.

And, if you do come up with some fun new way to change the sport enough to make the video easier and better... well, how much will you have changed it from the basic game? Change it too much and even the paintball players might tend to lose interest.

Doc.

**Shaftski** · 07-13-2021, 10:24 AM

In auto racing, you never see the driver's face, but can definitely feel the intensity of the moment from the way it is filmed. You can't see the participant at all actually until you go to an in-car cam.

Check out an F1 broadcast sometime, excellent balance of cinematography, technical analysis, play-by-play you name it. And you never see the participant until the end. Several focal points of action and they keep you very informed about what is happening all over the track.

We wound up with xball because it was supposed to be more film/tv friendly. The game was just fine to play before that.

**Jonnydread** · 07-13-2021, 10:49 AM

Originally posted by DocsMachine View Post

Paintball is such a niche market that there's simply nowhere near enough real interest to bother broadcasting it.

I think this is the big takeaway. I think even if you did all the various things that OP described and did them exactly right, it still wouldn't be enough to garner a healthy interest in people who aren't already big into paintball. Take my opinions with a grain of salt though because I don't really enjoy watching any sports.

**vijil** · 07-13-2021, 03:33 PM

"Change it too much and even the paintball players might tend to lose interest."

Well, see, I don't care really. That's fine. The traditional speedball core is pretty toxic. If the core of PB as it stands doesn't work, then I have no problem starting from scratch in principle. The issue would be the risk of course. Take overwatch - shooting is a big part of it, but the core of the game is the objective. Shooting plays the role of tackling in football, where it's a means to an end but not the end in itself. Personally that's how I'd like to see paintball, but that's just me and YMMV. I'm the guy who runs around without a gun, trying to get the flag.

"we HAVE tried a ton of them" (modes)

Well.. kindof. We've tried various combinations of the big four factors - bunker density/shape, field size, fire volume and player count. These are the obvious ones. Objective based formats (ie with focal points) have been much less tried from a watchability perspective. They certainly have been tried, but not to the same extent, and generally they're tried once or twice without tuning or proper beta testing and that's it. Most of the time they're an afterthought. (buzzers...). Objective based modes tend to be more used in woodsball. Maybe that's why I like woodsball more these days.

"cost..."

Yeah, I understand this. That said, besides live streaming from barrel cams, there's nothing I've mentioned that's particularly more expensive than what's out there already. The 3 second delay thing is mostly a software issue - even using existing casters with little or no extra training it would improve things. The rest is just camera placement and a few ideas about when to choose which shot. In some ways it gets easier.

"Paintball is such a niche market that there's simply nowhere near enough real interest to bother broadcasting it."

I don't care about TV broadcast. I'm thinking entirely in terms of improving streaming. TV is basically dead. Twitch and youtube are the future, and they're what turns niche into less niche.

I'll say this - streaming is a marketing channel. It is not a product. If the stream is PPV especially on finals day, you might as well forget about the whole thing. Better to have one endzone camera and no commentary, but free on twitch and youtube and FB, than 32 cameras and a pro commentary crew and all the graphics in the world... and a paid stream.

Marketing paintball... well that's a whole different topic.

**DocsMachine** · 07-13-2021, 04:26 PM

The statements "I don't care if paintballers lose interest" and wanting to put it on YouTube are almost, but not quite, mutually exclusive.

When I said "broadcast", I did in fact mean things like streaming, YT, Vimeo, etc. The term is simply a holdover, like saying you're "filming" something.

The fact is, it doesn't matter what medium you intend to distribute it in or on, the whole idea here is to make it more watchable. Talking about making paintball more watchable, but being unconcerned if paintball players show any interest or not, is rather contradictory. It's like buying a McDonalds franchise and not caring if anyone buys any food.

And again, making it watchable is a laudable goal. But to do it was you say would be expensive, and without what few day-to-day players we have to watch it, it's a lost cause before it even starts.

Doc.

**The Inflicted** · 07-13-2021, 05:03 PM

Try to make the finished product look as much like a cinematic gunfight as possible and work backwards from there.

That means fewer players (3 on 3?) that start far enough away and with significant cover from the other team that they don't know when they will encounter them. The field should be designed so that a viewer can instantly tell how far up or back a player is- either through thematic or color-based cues (one side could be blue in color and progressively get more red as you get to other side, possibly through lighting). All players should be mic'ed, and the editing should cinematically tell the story of how each player found each other on the field.

**Tinybear** · 07-13-2021, 08:53 PM

What it all boils down to is cost.

There’s just not enuff profit or interest in paintball to make filming paintball worth it. Who is your target audience? for all that investment

Paintball was reinvented before for the sake of spectatorship. That why we have speedball. And for a while it worked as the sport was far larger and rapidly growing. People tuned into the tv to see what all the buzz was. But today paintballs much smaller and much more akin to bowling. Bowling is easy to film. But you don’t see a lot of people watching that.

The biggest thing we can do to make filming paintball better is get more people into playing. The larger the interest in paintball the larger the potential audience and thus the larger potential profit for filming.

**DocsMachine** · 07-14-2021, 04:27 AM

It's generally called a pivot, or at least a partial pivot. Similar product, new market. Obviously I'm referring to ignoring the current PB market, new players would be another matter.

-In my opinion, that's even worse. Basically it'd be advertised as paintball, but isn't, in fact, actually paintball. You'd be turning off the enthusiasts who wanted to see paintball, and you wouldn't attract those who have no interest in the sport.

If you're going to try something new, in my opinion, go entirely new.

More like McDonald's aiming for a different demo with a tweaked product.

-It's worth noting that Mickey-D's tried exactly that, "upgrading" their menu with fancy "artisan" ingredients and pretentious wanna-be-Starbucks coffees. Went over like a lead balloon, despite the fact those same things sold like the proverbial hotcakes in their respective markets. Except people don't go to MickDeez for artisan chicken sandwiches and $7-a-cup coffees. They want gut-bomb burgers, a cardboard sleeve full of greasy fries, and a Diet Coke because they're trying to cut back.

Ditto people wanting to watch a paintball game. You tell them it's paintball, but then show is actually about people trying to play underwater poker where they have to win a hand to restart their air supply, you're not going to keep the paintball market and you're not going to attract the non-paintball viewer either.

Absolutely it would be risky - but only in the sense that any new idea with a new target market is risky. Could totally flop. That's just how it goes.

-Yessir. And the further you get from "the real thing", the riskier it becomes.

You're talking about two premises here: The first is to improve how existing games are recorded, to make the resulting video better, more exciting and easier to follow. The second is to change the game so significantly that it's both easier to record, and perhaps appeals to a wider range of viewers.

The former is comparatively safe, the latter is extremely risky.

Doc.

**vijil** · 07-14-2021, 04:43 PM

Yep, those are the two things I'm looking at. Filming, and the game itself.

I think I've made an OK case for some tweaks to how filming is done, but mode is always going to be trickier.

I think maybe you overstate the changes I'd propose making to the game. Paintball has had everything over the years - from battle royale (the first game, after all) through 10 man, 7 man, Xball, AFPL Redzone, NSL, a bunch of others. That's ignoring woodsball. Do you really think (for example, I'm making this up) speedball with respawns and a flag with a point for the pull is *that* big a change? There's also the demographic - kids now understand bomb planting, payload shifting, objective modes in a way they just didn't ten years ago, thanks to gaming. So I disagree that a new objective based format would be "not paintball".

Re McDonalds - interesting point. Here in NZ they did exactly that. $19 combos, gourmet burgers. In *this* market it's an absolute hit. Not so much the coffee (starbucks failed miserably here because their coffee sucks). They're by far the highest end of the big fast food restaurants and they're absolutely raking in the cash. So the lesson is more about risk and knowing your market.

I get it though. I helped design the HK Pro Tour 1v1 format. It was an attempt to make 1v1 more interesting than just a pure gunfight. It didn't really work. I can own that.

Maybe there's a bigger question here too about top-down vs bottom-up. Talking about filming paintball and pro modes and etc. is all top down.

Bottom up would mean you gradually design and refine your ideas at the grassroots level, perhaps with a weeknight social league in the city for the professional crowd, a few beginner teams playing over a bunch of weeks like social league soccer. Rental markers, hopperball, maybe even 50 cal. Gradually expand to get other fields involved, eventually create divisions with promotion/relegation, and then the social players become your core audience to watch the eventual top teams go at it. Set up a small webcast (cheap but very carefully done), gradually introduce prizes, and if (low risk here) the format is good and appealing, you'll be able to grow naturally. Eventually, who knows. That would be my preferred approach. No harm no foul if it doesn't work.

**Brokeass_baller** · 07-15-2021, 01:06 AM

Why does paintball HAVE to be filmed like other sports, and why does it HAVE to be televised? Why does it HAVE to be in the Olympics? Why does it HAVE to offer million dollar professional salaries like NFL and MLB?

I'm totally ok with paintball being niche, and staying niche. I don't care for mainstream sports, but I love paintball. I don't want that money-centric focus ruining what I love. I'm more than content with GoSports broadcastings, and the small-time classic mech streams on YouTube and Facebook. I love the way Alabaster Slim, Nightmare, and Hidden Hedgehog present scenario games on YouTube, with a dramatic FPS perspective. I love what's going on right now with paintball and paintball media. I think ESPN coverage of the sport would only bastardize and dilute what we have.

Paintball isn't like any other sport. We shouldn't be forcing it to be like every other sport.

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