Yeah, I was thinking, "Real your neck in, mate." I mean, when something happens and you immediately react, that's one thing, but after the first step of walking over to somebody that's surely time to think, "This is not going to end well..."
One time somebody used a bunch of dead men walking as cover to walk right up to a bunch of 3 of us - it was a night game, we were standing behind netting which, for the purposes of the game, was considered hard cover and, since they seemed to be bimbling along in the general direction of their regen, but in a night game you can never be too sure, one of us shouted to ask if they were dead men (I forget: could have been me, could have been a couple of us) and a few shouts in the affirmative came back... so we go back to our tactical discussion (and for a change I use the word correctly as we were discussing tactics). Out of the corner of my eye I was aware of someone walking towards us, but I wasn't concerned because dead men are no threat and at least one of the 3 of us was looking in that direction so I assumed that if we had anything to worry about he would alert us.
So to get to where we were without lifting the net this person had to move completely out of my sight and perhaps that is why I turned around and took a couple of steps towards him. I wasn't thinking about it, even though in hindsight I realised that I did know he was the opposition, because Tris is, by even the most charitable assessment, one of the most rotund players currently active in the UK, so it's not as if I could not notice even out of the corner of my eye... so he bimbles up, produces his pistol from behind his back and pops me twice in the belly from about 2.5-3m away, gets both my mates and takes a 50/50 from one iirc. I was fucking fuming. I mean, apart from the cheating, it hurt. So I lost it for a sec, stepped up and shouted in his face, "You fucking arsehole, Tris!" It was aggressive and, subconsciously, I spose I did mean it to be.
In that moment, if he had given me some lip back and it had not seemed funny (and to be fair, coming from Tris, some aggressive rejoinder could well have done), I may have shoved him over/thrown him to the floor. It's unlikely I would have punched him, because that's not really my modus operandi, even when I've been assaulted, but that's not the issue. The point is that I can't be certain that I would not have initiated violence in the heat of the moment. But from the shots in the UBACS covered belly to the syllable "Tris!" took no more than 1.5 seconds, if I'd had to walk over to him, I know I'd have had my shit together and, no matter how egregious I considered the offence or how annoyed I was, I would never initiate violence without first, at the very least, yelling at someone.
I consider that my behaviour was out of order and if the marshals had excluded me from the rest of the night's play (since booting a non-driver off site in the middle of night would not have been much of an option), I would have understood and not complained. I would have gracefully accepted a month ban even. However I would have insisted that Tris was also censured for his behaviour.
This did cause a storm in a tea cup a few days later when he attempted to lie his way out of his part in the whole debacle, but this was pure keyboard warrior stylee an ting. On the night in question I apologised to him maybe an hour after swearing at him, at my first opportunity, and the 3 of us told him that we considered what he had done to be not technically 100% cheating, but definitely borderline and totally against the spirit of the game, to which he replied that he understood. A few days later he claimed to have not understood what we were talking about, to have thought what we said "weird", and that his 'sneaking' over to us had nothing to do with our challenging the dead men walking... yeah, obviously that was true... my arse. TBH I was actually more angry with him for impugning my honesty later than the original offence and, rest assured, within the letter of the rules (in exactly the same way as he behaved), at some point I will have my revenge on the lying shitbag.
Anyway, no action was taken and, despite the fact that rules were broken, I don't believe any was needed. I spose that since I do intend to make Tris rue the day he called me a liar, we could take the view that some intervention by marshals and a definitive conclusion brought about would have been a better outcome, but since he lied his arse off later, I have no reason to doubt that he would have lied his arse off at the time, so what could a marshal have actually done? Well, 3 against 1 is usually to be believed, but honestly, even though I know what did happen, I would not be comfortable with bans being handed out on hearsay and what else can a marshal do that does actually mean something? I often think that we should use a sin bin approach, so that minor infractions of the rules can be punished without marshals having to make a decision that really pisses players off, in which case people would be a lot less willing to bend rules or break minor rules, acting in ways which do provoke people to genuine anger, and if that were the case, we would not see as much bad behaviour as a result...
But when I'm considering what, if any, measures need to be taken over someone's behaviour in game, this is the incident I compare it to. I don't just think about the incident itself though, but what happened after and how I, being culpable, would have reacted to the kind of pitchforks and torches stylee an ting which we've seen around this subject. If I had been banned from airsoft in the UK for life over this, if it had got worse, Tris would have a reason to be genuinely worried, whereas as it stands, unless he sees me kitting up in the safe zone, he probably never even thinks of the incident.