and "walk on" now means pre-book.
I miss the days when you could turn up, pay your green fee and play BB wars without needing to pre-book in advance.
This is a much discussed topic in paintball over at the last year as well.
The origins of ‘walk on’ come from the sense of just turning up to play, and covered those with all their own equipment as opposed to a ‘rental’ player so had ‘few’ needs from the site. Throughout my playing life ‘walk on’ meant a day or session dedicated to players with their own equipment
These tended to be run by a keen player and would have a fairly regular crowd.
Marshalling as a matter of safety requires a reasonable ratio of player to marshall to keep an eye on unpredictable rental players - but in practice could turn out to be just one marshall per side - sites ought to be planning their staff for any particular day so would have needed pre bookings for rentals to judge the numbers
Walkons could be expected to be better behaved and not need constant eyes on them for goggle removal etc so could run a walkon day for any numbers on minimum staff - a few extra players made no difference
That was in theory fine if the walkon was guaranteed to have someone playing, and if you were allowing bring your own paint - but a nuisance for a site to know what stock they needed and walkon paintballers don’t want to play with basic rental paint - a site would not want to stock up on a higher grade paint which would go ‘off’ if held over time and in uncontrolled conditions
Now there are very few paintball sites catering for walkons, and those that do tend to post up every now and again about attendance levels
One site that we have been involved with must pay a fee to the landowner whenever people are on site - this included me turning up alone or a couple of us site walking or event preparing
Fine if it was a day with rental bookings, but a prohibitive expense for one or two people to wander or to run a walk on based on the off chance that people might turn up
Then add staff costs - the site should be paying out at least minimum wage to someone for the duration of the day plus an hour or so either side for opening up and shutting down - I am aware that airsoft can often be relying on the voluntary side of player marshals (and that is also how the hey day of walkons happened due to ‘keen’ locals willing to put in the work to make them happen
To a player today it does mean that you should plan to play, sort your admin out to book and also turn up - if you’ve paid a deposit and don’t turn up because it’s wet then that is something to compensate the cost but demoralising for staff to open up for nobody or a handful
………
Much of the recent conversations in paintball have been to try and rename ‘walkons’ into something more meaningful, but even the sites involved in the conversations still have ‘walkon’ on their websites / social media
