Thursday, May 27, 2010

.50 cal paintball?

Last year out of the blue, some paintball manufacturers decided to starting hyping up something new, .50 caliber paint. I was pretty damn skeptical about the whole ".50 cal revolution" simply because GI Milsim and Kingman are the main companies that are pushing for it. I am sorry but I don't want a .50 cal Smart Parts marker or a .50 cal Spyder. Also, Planet Eclipse has released a .50 cal conversion it for its Ego's and Etek's, but seriously the kit is around $150, it's a recession; I don't even have the cash to afford and Ego/Etek let alone a conversion kit for it. Since those markers have little appeal among many paintball players and seeing how steep the price is for a conversion kit is, I feel the whole .50 cal thing is going to be hard to get it up and running.

One thing I don't get is I feel the companies that are backing this whole .50 cal "revolution", need to advertise the hell our of their products especially to newer players. I think if the companies can get the newer players to adopt .50 cal they might have something going for them, because to the experienced player the ads look don't look believable at all. The .50 caliber paintball is advertised in such a way that it should be better than .68 caliber, but we all know nothing is perfect.
Well I really believe that .50 cal will end up like the .43 cal paintballs and markers and be a small nice but it would be nice to see a change in the paintball and have .50 cal succeed. If or when most of the paintball companies adopt .50 cal and many quality products are released I would gladly make the transition to .50 caliber.

Playing pump paintball for good

Yeah I said it, I am officially playing pump paintball for good and I am done with playing semi auto. I am done with electronic markers. No more batteries, expensive hoppers or expensive guns.



Initially I started playing pump because I simply could not afford to shoot a ton of paint anymore with my PMR 09. I realized I had to either quit paintball or find some way to save a lot of money. That is when the idea of purchasing a pump marker came to mind. So last summer I decided to take the plunge and buy an Azodin Kaos pump. I loved it instantly, it was so simple; I liked the idea of not having to fiddle with electronics anymore.

Now almost a year later I finally realized that I don't need a marker that shoots 10+ ball per second to be a good speedball player. From simply playing pump for around 10 months I have had a far greater improvement in skill compared to the improvements I have had in the 4 years before I started playing pump. I realized the increased rate of fire I had before I played pump masked my poor skill since I was able to shoot my way out of a problem or get lucky from shooting lanes and playing pump really showed me the areas I needed to work on, like snap shooting and even aiming properly. I am pretty glad that I don't have to spend money on 9 volts or AA batteries or being worried about my gun or my hoppers crapping out on me. The best perk besides the improvement in skill is that I barely shoot any paint, when I used to have my PMR I could go through a case of paint like it was nothing in one day at the speedball field. Now that I play with my Kaos pump, I go through half a bag of paint per day on average, because of this there is no way I will play semi auto again (unless I win the lottery of course, if I did would consider giving semi auto play another chance).

Well there you have it, being able not to afford spending a large sums of money on paint was a blessing in disguise because I discovered the growing niche of pump paintball.
pmr