The 'How Did Your Airsoft Day Go? Thread

Saturday jaunt to "under 18's" day at Apocalypse in sittingbourne.....
I took my boy and three of his mates, normally this isnt a major issue but we got rid of the Peugeot 3008 funbus last year and that could carry everything, so logistics was the first problem. 5 people and waaaaay too much airsoft gear in my Giulietta caused a few head scratching moments!!
Got there, braved the hill (its a big assed steep hill from the car park to the staging areas!!) and signed in. Got everyone set up and chrono'd, only to find my WE galaxy not firing, i think i picked up the wrong mags, some of our Glock/AP ones don't play nicely, so that got relegated to the bergen.
Using the DE M904 on 0.32 all day. Shoots at about 1 joule. which is pleasant.

First game was a washout for me as one of the batteries i had promptly fell over and the ETU said no, so back to safe zone and buy a new battery. It was old to be fair to it. :D

The boy came back grinning but complaining that his VMP1 wasn't hopping, and in fairness to him, i tried it on the range. Yup. poop. Need to do something about that as the replacement ones are £100 and that's a bit steep really. apparently the barrels and hop unit are very specific to this model. Hmm.

Second game the reds (us) just got steamrollered by teh blues in a pole domination type thing, three posts, have to be your colour side up at the end of the game. If you've ever been to apoc, you'd appreciate how bloody big this site is and once the blues got dug in, we just kept running into the wall of death!! LOL. :D

Lunch was the usual fare of "stuff we dont get to eat at home because mum says its shite" so we all enjoyed that. :D

Did my bit for helping out a new player, young lad rocked up with a cyma AK and jumped on the end of our bench set up, so we got chatting and it turned out it was his first game using his own pew, (you get a free game if you spend over £100 on rifs at the shop) and someone had given me a load of BB's in unopened bottles, so i gave him a couple cos i could hear him chatting with his mum about buying some more. Nice kid too.

Afternoon games included a respawn swap from the pole game to keep it fair (we still got flattened!) and then a short CQB gig in the village. I try to avoid the last game of the day as i'm usually knackered and it can get a bit mad. I'm too old for all that. :D

Tested out the P90 with the M4 mag attachment. thats VERY silly. Seems to like 0.32 better than 0.28's too, but at that fire rate (its modded a fair bit!) it burns through rounds like its an LMG!!

The boys had a great day, still love going to apocolypse, even after 4 years of going up and down that sodding hill!! Good marshalling, had a couple of cease fires with face pro issues, coupe of usual suspects on the bulletproof players, but they got corrected with a few more 0.32's....

Good day all round, spent Sunday just chilling as everything ached (had finished my shifts on Friday, needed to mong out for the say really!!!)

Good:
*The badger rocks. probably needs a service and a warhead 32k,
*Kids listen to the instructions more than the adults
*Never seems to get stale, the marshalls are awesome
*Snipers were playing fair too

Bad:
*Batteries dont live forever but at £15 i cant argue really!
*VMP needs looking at so it can hop something better than a 0.25
*mags need marking up a bit better as all the glock/ap/galaxy ones look the same
*Interior of the car now needs a damn good clean... :D


Love it. Game on......
 
Egon_247 said:
Saturday jaunt to "under 18's" day at Apocalypse in sittingbourne.....
I took my boy and three of his mates, normally this isnt a major issue but we got rid of the Peugeot 3008 funbus last year and that could carry everything, so logistics was the first problem. 5 people and waaaaay too much airsoft gear in my Giulietta caused a few head scratching moments!!
Got there, braved the hill (its a big assed steep hill from the car park to the staging areas!!) and signed in. Got everyone set up and chrono'd, only to find my WE galaxy not firing, i think i picked up the wrong mags, some of our Glock/AP ones don't play nicely, so that got relegated to the bergen.
Using the DE M904 on 0.32 all day. Shoots at about 1 joule. which is pleasant.

First game was a washout for me as one of the batteries i had promptly fell over and the ETU said no, so back to safe zone and buy a new battery. It was old to be fair to it. :D

The boy came back grinning but complaining that his VMP1 wasn't hopping, and in fairness to him, i tried it on the range. Yup. poop. Need to do something about that as the replacement ones are £100 and that's a bit steep really. apparently the barrels and hop unit are very specific to this model. Hmm.

Second game the reds (us) just got steamrollered by teh blues in a pole domination type thing, three posts, have to be your colour side up at the end of the game. If you've ever been to apoc, you'd appreciate how bloody big this site is and once the blues got dug in, we just kept running into the wall of death!! LOL. :D

Lunch was the usual fare of "stuff we dont get to eat at home because mum says its shite" so we all enjoyed that. :D

Did my bit for helping out a new player, young lad rocked up with a cyma AK and jumped on the end of our bench set up, so we got chatting and it turned out it was his first game using his own pew, (you get a free game if you spend over £100 on rifs at the shop) and someone had given me a load of BB's in unopened bottles, so i gave him a couple cos i could hear him chatting with his mum about buying some more. Nice kid too.

Afternoon games included a respawn swap from the pole game to keep it fair (we still got flattened!) and then a short CQB gig in the village. I try to avoid the last game of the day as i'm usually knackered and it can get a bit mad. I'm too old for all that. :D

Tested out the P90 with the M4 mag attachment. thats VERY silly. Seems to like 0.32 better than 0.28's too, but at that fire rate (its modded a fair bit!) it burns through rounds like its an LMG!!

The boys had a great day, still love going to apocolypse, even after 4 years of going up and down that sodding hill!! Good marshalling, had a couple of cease fires with face pro issues, coupe of usual suspects on the bulletproof players, but they got corrected with a few more 0.32's....

Good day all round, spent Sunday just chilling as everything ached (had finished my shifts on Friday, needed to mong out for the say really!!!)

Good:
*The badger rocks. probably needs a service and a warhead 32k,
*Kids listen to the instructions more than the adults
*Never seems to get stale, the marshalls are awesome
*Snipers were playing fair too

Bad:
*Batteries dont live forever but at £15 i cant argue really!
*VMP needs looking at so it can hop something better than a 0.25
*mags need marking up a bit better as all the glock/ap/galaxy ones look the same
*Interior of the car now needs a damn good clean... :D


Love it. Game on......
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The trek up the hill is a killer start to the day but does mean I pack light and only take what I really need.

Left my phone in the car on Sunday as a mate called me as I arrived so had to trek back down to get it but the walk back up was significantly easier without 30kg of kit 🤣

At least it's flat(ish) when you get up there.
 
On the occasions that I have played there I have never found the hill particularly troublesome; it is far from being the worst aspect of the site.
 
Some days its good, other days its bad. weird isnt it? I knw johns had some fun and games with marshalls up there. They seem to be sharing marshalls with his other sites as well now, so theyre all over the place. :D
 
That would explain it; however, when it means that players get a poor experience, that is inexcusable. I know that marshalling can be difficult; I have marshalled at two sites and been offered marshalling gigs at two others. However, there is no excuse for marshals not knowing the game rules.
 
Went to Driver Wood today and... I'd love to say it was great, but it was pretty awful. To their credit, the marshalls were trying to police the non-hit taking and I saw them doing a lot of hit-checking today, but holy crap was it bad for non-hit takers today. Also, someone threw a tantrum when a marshall told him not to keyhole with his DMR (seems like common sense to me, because MED plus 0 visibility on the other side of the keyhole sounds like an accident waiting to happen?) and was either sent off the field or stormed off in a tantrum; I wasn't there to see it, but I overheard the marshalls talking about it so I don't know the exact details.

Second, teams were horrendously poorly balanced. I don't mind being on the weaker team, as I enjoy the challenge, but today was bad enough for even me to point it out as a problem. One team had a load of the regulars, plus a milsim group who were in attendance today, plus almost all the ghillies. Our team was a handful of regulars, but were mostly a bunch of randoms and tracksuit wearing teenagers. The one full game I managed to play today (spoiler alert I guess?), the enemy team had all 10 objectives in the first 5 minutes.

Third thing that was bad was the amount of DMR trigger spam, and from what I can see this isn't policed at all, though I do get it's hard to do, as you can't tell at a glance if an MTW is a 1.1J trigger spam or a 1.88J trigger spam. I've observed it a lot, but until today I wasn't too sure and assumed it was 1.1J guns shooting at me. But today I saw it multiple times, and from the same direction as 1.1J guns were also shooting from. So when I was watching the 1.1J guns dropping about 15m too short, I then had the same volume of fire come in that slammed into the wall behind me after I quickly stood up, then got back down before I could get hit. It's pretty damn rampant at Driver Wood and I'll frequently get into a firefight that I'm either anticipating single shots in response, or the return fire to drop short and it's definitely one of my recurring criticisms of the site.

So that's the gameplay parts that made the day bad, and I wish it stopped there.

First game I took my m21 out. Full steel RA-Tech m14 GBBR set up with a 3-18x50mm scope and locked to semi-auto only and oh boy is it fun to shoot and is 100% going to be my favoured DMR going forward. However, the hop and barrel setup was incredibly mid, and the mags were inconsistent between themselves; they're consistent enough in isolation, but where one may be 1.8J, another is more like 1.4J. I sort of anticipated the latter, so I'm not too bummed out about that. I'll get some 100mph tape and sit on the range to shim all my mags to make them consistent between each other. Will also take out the hop and barrel assembly and put in my own stuff as the SWIT airsoft stuff was "okay", but "okay" isn't good enough for a DMR. I think I'll probably do an I-key, Stalker barrel and either a 4uantum or flamingo hop rubber. So that game was a wash. Also the 1911 struggled, which wasn't too surprising either.

Second game I took out my pre-ban Tanaka m700 AICS, and oh boy did it look like it was shooting well. I wish I could've properly told though, as it seems like the scope mount is vertically off by a fraction of a degree, meaning all of my shots appeared through the scope to be going up, even with the scope adjusted all the way down.

After lunch, I took the SRS out and thank the heavens that I packed it, as otherwise I would've just packed up there and headed home. Played the afternoon games with the SRS and my HK45 for a sidearm, both of which were shooting amazingly well, but this is where I encountered a load of DMR trigger spam, so that wasn't fun.

In the last game of the day one poor fellow took a bad fall and dislocated his knee. The marshalls handled this well, with an immediate cease fire getting called so they could tend to him, while moving the game onto another field when it was clear it wouldn't be a quick fix. They also gave a group a massive bollocking for shooting I decided to call it there anyway, as I wasn't too keen sniping in the rain on this other field which isn't great for sniping in the first place. I really feel for the guy who took a fall though, as it sounded incredibly painful!

Also, it was raining. A lot. All day. And Driver Wood is incredibly slipping and muddy and boggy and horrible when it's very wet.

I hate the rain... Can it be summer already? Or at least spring?

Anyway, time to get all my stuff out to air so it doesn't get all rusty and nasty.
 
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Even putting aside the technical issues and the injury, that sounds like a pretty poor day. I have only been to Driver Wood once and haven't felt inspired to go there again. The reports on here don't inspire confidence.
 
Honestly, nothing I hear about it makes me want to head there at all. I live in constant amazement that it attracts so many people virtually every week.
 
The site itself is amazing, and they put a lot of effort into developing it. The game modes have improved too. But they definitely have a player mentality / general vibe issue for sure. It's not all the players, as I've met some great people there too, but there are definitely issues with some players.
 
Driver Wood is my local site - I mostly have a good to excellent day there. Occasional issues with hit taking, but not to the point where it seems any different from elsewhere to be honest. I think the team balancing is the usual area that the place lets itself down - all the regulars always stand in the same side of the briefing area, and when the imaginary line is drawn down the middle, the rest of us who deliberately stand on the other side of the briefing area always have a significant chunk of first timers and rentals.
 
Impulse said:
The site itself is amazing, and they put a lot of effort into developing it. The game modes have improved too. But they definitely have a player mentality / general vibe issue for sure. It's not all the players, as I've met some great people there too, but there are definitely issues with some players.
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The safe zone is great and well organised, albeit a bit odd with all the other groups around, which made it feel a tad insecure. I didn't find the site itself to be particularly amazing; it was decent, but no more than that.
 
The_Lord_Poncho said:
Driver Wood is my local site - I mostly have a good to excellent day there. Occasional issues with hit taking, but not to the point where it seems any different from elsewhere to be honest. I think the team balancing is the usual area that the place lets itself down - all the regulars always stand in the same side of the briefing area, and when the imaginary line is drawn down the middle, the rest of us who deliberately stand on the other side of the briefing area always have a significant chunk of first timers and rentals.
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Marshalls need to raise their voices a bit then and take the team balancing to task. They can say "oi you lot your going on the other side."
 
Nice day out at Skirmish Budby today (3rd game there in 4 weeks).

Surprising player mix after a few weeks of at least one big rental group - virtually all regulars and experienced players with I think two total rentals. Maybe 40-50 players total so not too crazy.
Player demographics meant it was actually really balanced gameplay all day long, which is a nice change (lately it's ended up with one team saddled with the big rental group who refuse to be split up at the start, and some pretty unbalanced games until lunch). Only two marshals on duty, because there was a big paintball tournament on as well, but they worked well together, one was a very young lad being trained up and I have to say he did a cracking job, even with the usual little slips you'd expect from someone inexperienced.

Weather held all day, marshals and players nice and friendly as usual, and there was actually a distinct lack of major aggro, even with the usual 3pm blues. A couple of people being a bit dodgy with hit taking at times, but really par for the course with any game day and less than most, and I only saw one little bit of aggy back and forth (sniper felt that they'd been overkilled - I watched it and tbf half a team stumbled across their position, they took a shot, and then EVERYONE hosed the undergrowth, so kinda... what the sniper surrender rule is for I guess. Unfortunately one guy tried to make it an argument, but it shut down pretty quick and everyone moved on). Generally good banter between teams, plenty of different fun guns and kits on display, including quite a few milsim rigs which I always enjoy nerding out about.

Game modes were decent and actually a bit experimental at a site where usually you can set your watch to what you're going to play - the traditional village attack/defend was missing which is a shame as it's always one of my highlights, but a really good quickfire CQB back-and-forth (two rounds each atk and def) made good use of the old fort. The pushback was replaced with a kinda-sorta milsim style mission - five objectives scattered across half the site, defenders could respawn there until each was captured and flipped, attackers respawned on a moving flag. I really enjoyed not being boxed into one map, but a few people got a bit confused by a new mission. Definitely some room for improvement, but a really fun alternative long game.

Ran my KA SBR9 all day, still diagnosing some midcap syndrome from last week that, like clockwork, comes on about half 3 after being fine all day. Otherwise ran okay, not as nicely as last week I felt, but it's off for a full tear-down service on Friday which should clear it up and get it back to goodness. Had a brand new StratAim Echo with me, got one use of it in the CQB round and then it started venting from the lower body when filling, which was annoying to say the least, but it wouldn't be airsoft without something breaking.

My quiet NY resolution was to play more this year, and I'm already trending well ahead. Back there next Saturday running an E&L Krink, excited to see how it fares.

Overall - a nice, solid day of airsoft. Made some plays that were good for my standards and felt fun, got in some good gunfights, had a laugh. Can't really ask for too much more.
 
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