Another weekend, another dissertation to write about how the game went. I went to Worthing as usual and bumped into
@Hatchet there this week, which was nice! I decided to bring my HPA VSR, even though it's not perfect at the moment since I am waiting on a 300mm inner barrel and a bunch of foam to arrive so that I can internally suppress it further. At the moment, it's a 430mm widebore in a 470mm bull barrel, so 40mm is foam, but with a 300mm inner barrel it'll be 170mm of foam and should make it nice and quiet. It was still a little bit chilly for the m700 and I was picking up my AEG m14, so I decided the VSR was the best to bring. Set it up, got it shooting 2.28J and hopping .45s nicely, so I was good to go. Picked up the m14 and decided I'd zero the LPVO and set the hop after lunch as the morning was going to be a big, multi-objective game until lunch and that's my preferred way of playing. Sidearm choice today was my HK45, as it was definitely warm enough for GBB pistols and I way prefer them to mk23s, so I was keen to use it.
After the safety brief I got a bit annoyed though. The marshalls made a point to split me and my friend up (again) and also split another regular from his two friends. This is the 2nd week in a row they've picked me and my friend out and made a point to separate us onto different teams, so I wasn't that impressed heading out for the first game. We got the far spawn, so a long walk out at first, and I had no idea what the objectives were so I decided to just follow and support my team as best I could. The start of the game had the rentals all around the Tower area and neither team could spawn until their team's rentals recovered an ammo box and brought it back to the spawn. An interesting idea in theory, as I'm always interested in seeing people try new things, but it didn't really work and after 15 mins they just released both teams. I took a conservative position, crawling under a holly bush and setting up a position overlooking the checkpoint on the path. Didn't take long for the yellows to push up to it and I got a lot of kills from that spot without getting detected at all. I kept waiting to make sure I got a good shot off, lulling the other team into a false sense of security at times by making them think I had moved, before taking another one of them out. It was good fun and this allowed my team to push up and take the checkpoint after I picked off enough players to dissuade the remnants from peeking or people from reinforcing. At this time I saw our team (blues) had found an objective (a dummy on a stretcher) that we needed to get to the stables building in the Tower area; they had pushed it out onto the path, but got hit in the process and had to drop the stretcher, so it was now heavily contested. So with checkpoint under our control I got myself out from under the holly bush and pushed into the heavily wooded area to the left of the path to come up on the corner of it to try and establish some forward control. I linked up with a friend who had also pushed up there with his AEG and we basically played sniper and spotter for a while, him picking off targets on the flank and me holding a line on the chapel, quite a popular spot to fight from. Blues kept pushing and managed to get the stretcher into the stables building, so now we had to hold it for 20 mins. I crawled further up as I saw blues pushing well into the Tower area, finding my way to a spot next to a tree that overlooked the path, but from the other side of the Tower area, so I took position there and started to cut off reinforcements, forcing them to take harder routes into the area. It worked really well, much to one marshall's amusement as he watched me get into position and take care of business. However, blues were doing a bit too well and our guys who had now taken the chapel were asked to give it up, and another marshall dropped a green smoke next to me. Green smoke counts as toxic, but fortunately the wind carried it the other way, however with its proximity it was only a matter of time before it expanded to where I was, so I quickly uprooted and fell back to the corner spot I was in before. We managed to hold for the 20 mins and shortly after that the game was over.
Something that really worked well for me was I used camo paint for my face along with my ghillie instead of a balaclava or lower face mask today and it worked really, really well. Lower face masks make my glasses fog up (as it routes breath up into my glasses) and I can't get away from that as I have prescription inserts and can't use contact lenses. My balaclava, especially on warm days, makes me sweat buckets which also fogs up my glasses, but camo paint keeps a nice air flow and it worked really, really well. £4 and it'll last me a while, so I think I'm going to continue using camo paint. Big success!
I had a LOT of fun in this game and the VSR was performing flawlessly as it tends to (I also took the advice of
@Badgerlicious and ran my gunbilical cord around my left side instead of my right and it worked really, really well, stopping it getting caught as much and never getting caught on my own kit (my line loves catching on my pistol suppressor!)). However, I had a massive criticism of how the game was run. It didn't affect me because I didn't get hit once, but the respawns were on clocks. This meant that you had a 5 minute window to respawn followed by 5 mins of not being able to respawn. What I heard from the friend I was split from, as well as another friend who was on the other team, is that they would spawn in, go out and try to play aggressive, get hit and then have to wait 5 mins again because it worked out that they would get back to spawn after about 5 mins, so they'd get back just in time for respawns to be closed. They said they spent 40 mins just sitting in spawn and it was incredibly frustrating. They played less than they were waiting in respawn. For a large, multi-objective game I don't think the clock spawns worked very well and made people very frustrated. A lot went home at lunch time because of it.
I didn't play the afternoon as I wanted to set up my m14 and then hang out with one of my friends who wasn't playing today; plus the sun was out and it was (almost) warm, so it was a nice day to just chill out. The m14 was performing stupidly well on the range, which was nice, and the LPVO was basically already zeroed. Don't know how the afternoon games went, but I really enjoyed my day. I think the fact that the sun was out and it wasn't freezing cold or wet definitely helped, though it was a bit breezy at times for sniping, but even that wasn't too bad. All in all it was a really fun morning of airsoft and I'm looking forward to the next months as it hopefully gets a bit warmer. I do better in warm weather, as I used to airsoft in Spain, and my guns do better in warm weather because I like my gas guns, so I'm glad to be this side of winter.