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The 'How Did Your Airsoft Day Go? Thread

It's how sites (and businesses) recover from the setbacks of the last 18 months that will define their future success, as has been said there's a right way and a wrong way. There's an abundance of people right now that want to catch up on all they missed out on in lockdown so there's a ton of demand and any business owner will want to get as much of that pie as they can, but as has been shown there's a fine line to tread so that you don't alienate those that were coming before and will continue to do so once things calm down a bit. Getting too greedy now may prove to be short-termist and cause more problems in future.

Am all for sites doing it the right way, weekday evening shoots would be right up my street as my weekends fill up fast. I for one am also happy to muck in with the maintenance too, we all want our sites to do well after all.

 
It's how sites (and businesses) recover from the setbacks of the last 18 months that will define their future success, as has been said there's a right way and a wrong way.


My preferred local site has worked hard to get things back to normal, they've put the effort in, and due to this I've decided that I'll buy my BB's and gas from there rather than online even though they cost a little more as they deserve to recover from all this mess.

 
But for me the real stab in the back is that just over a wk ago a large group of these ‘annoying’ airsofters spent a day at one of his other sites (and we were planning the same at the others as well) clearing all the overgrowth back and repairing the structures and barricades that had fallen in to disrepair due to the lockdown for him for free as we wanted to help him out as we knew money was tight !


Oof. OK, sounds like you've been properly mugged off.

Well, he's made his choice, all you can do is to make yours.

 
We have all suffered through covid, the site owner is no exception, but they aren't going about recovery if that is how they treat folk who choose to play at the site.

Anyone who has decent leasure retail experience will tell you its not the one-offs that grow a business, its the repeat client. Once they go then things get very tricky.

I know, as I'm sure others here do, that as self employed folk things are as hard now as ever as we have had to dip into savings, cut back, find cost saving where we can to survive.

Slapping the faces of locals and regulars isn't the way to do it.

 
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Again all valid points that you could sort of understand with a simple explanation but not this way , pre pandemic on a couple of occasions he actually thanked the airsofters at the end of a gameday for still turning up in large numbers wk in wk out during the ‘lean’ winter mths when all the other activities where dropping off due to crap weather .

But for me the real stab in the back is that just over a wk ago a large group of these ‘annoying’ airsofters spent a day at one of his other sites (and we were planning the same at the others as well) clearing all the overgrowth back and repairing the structures and barricades that had fallen in to disrepair due to the lockdown for him for free as we wanted to help him out as we knew money was tight !
So me personally I wont be forgiving or forgetting what happened on Sunday for a long time if ever .
What a Cnut, so he openly acknowledges that his airsoft regulars have given him a continuous revenue stream when all his other fair weather punters have stayed away, he's also exploited the good nature of self same airsofters by asking for free labour (& probably skill sets) towards the upkeep of HIS property, from which he profits, & then the first opportunity he gets, he stabs his most loyal client base in the back?.

As for whether we should consider if he's on the spectrum & that therefore affects how he deals with questions on his business ethics, what a load of bollocks, the guy runs 4 locations catering for "outdoor pursuits" & is probably minted, so clearly nothing has held him back up til now, he's just taken his most reliable (& in some ways naive, no offence meant) client base for granted, in the knowledge that if he can get guys working for nothing, then what other liberties can he get away with.

like I said, definitely no offence meant with my "naive" comment, I used to work in engineering on a heritage steam railway, as well as the skeleton crew of paid staff such as myself, the place had a massive core of volunteers, mostly retired people who were affectionately known as "puffer nutters", enthusiasts who were prepared to do all sorts of work, some of it menial & pretty shitty, just to get their fix of Steam etc.

What I found objectionable about this though was the upper management/board of governors paid themselves very very well, while making lots of empty promises to the small core of paid staff regarding bonuses, wage increases & other incentives, when in truth those in charge were doing their best to trim the paid workforce even further, in the hope the volunteers would take up the slack on the less skill intensive roles.

its one thing to volunteer for charitable ventures, but a completely different kettle of fish when greedy entrepreneurs exploit the interests of good natured reliable people, which I think is the case at druids EX-regular site.

 
What a Cnut, so he openly acknowledges that his airsoft regulars have given him a continuous revenue stream when all his other fair weather punters have stayed away, he's also exploited the good nature of self same airsofters by asking for free labour (& probably skill sets) towards the upkeep of HIS property, from which he profits, & then the first opportunity he gets, he stabs his most loyal client base in the back?..
Exactly AND it was us who came with the idea to help get the sites back up to scratch as in the end it would benefit us the most if the sites where back to full playability and not all over grown so we could only use the main tracks on them . Yea couple of carpenters an arborist and the manager of a tool hire place even offered free equipment to use ! You know what mate you are right we were bloody naive to think he’d not stitches us up ! Lesson learned . 

 
Trying to be charitable, he might have been having a bad day after realising that he'd taken on a lot more than he could deal with.

But that deserves an apology later.  If he's just shrugged it off then it's likely to happen again.

 
he might have been having a bad day after realising that he'd taken on a lot more than he could deal with.
I typed that in to Google translate, it came back with:

"Clearly the Greedy Cnut tried to squeeze every last penny out of the area of land he'd rented, without considering the the consequences or repercussions of his tightwad actions"

Isn't this new fangled technology amazing ?

 
First milsim event on the books and I'm going to ache tomorrow. Did something stupid like 24k steps through the event (kept my smart watch on under my gloves as I was curious) and only got 3h sleep! Was it enjoyable? You bet. Will I do it again? Probably not, but you never know. I think the happy middleground of filmsim / battle sim is where my preference will lie, as milsim just seems a bit too... uptight? Serious? Pay-to-win? (just keep reading, you'll know why I say this) I get why people are drawn to it, but to me it's just not my cup of tea; I play airsoft to have fun with friends and play BB wars and maybe do a bit of silly RP and follow a story through a longer event, I'm not looking for that strict military feeling.

High point? Our squad using site knowledge to sneak behind the entire enemy team using a really out of the way route to start engaging them from behind, though a premature endex hampered our impact as it took a while for the squad to get into position. It's such an out of the way route that one of the others in our squad was a regular on site and he didn't know about it. Runner up was dressing up in civvie gear and shouting insults at a very on-edge Taskforce after they got a journalist blown up by an IED.

Low point? No NODs in a sea of lots and lots of NODs (on both teams). Our squad did one firefight in the darkness because we were assigned to defend an objective and got absolutely rolled over by double our number where almost all of them had Gen2+ NODs, while our squad had none. I got one of them with the mp5k before getting hit myself as I just shot at the red light in the darkness, but the fight was over in less than 10 seconds.

 
Had a blast today but we all left earlier (around 11 AM) because the heat is unsustainable now.

I parked my car in the shadow and the when we got back it said 35°! Way too fucking much for me.

Nonetheless we managed to play a fair bit of games, we got a couple of new members and overall the day went smoothly.

On the technical side, I took the 933 which performed flawlessly and the aap, unfortunately this one decided to die on its first 3 shots, the hop wasn't doing anything other than pissing bbs at 5 metres (turns out it still doesn't like MR-Hops even with a TDC installed) so I threw it in my backpack and kept playing.

Shame as I would have liked to test the TDC potential.

I am forcing myself to drink regularly, it's something I don't usually do but staying hydrated is key on my field, I ended up drinking 4 litres of water without even realising it until I got back to the car, luckily there's a bar/restaurant thingy on the way back.

While we were at said bar we started talking about random stuff, at some point one guy approaches us asking what club we were part of, when we told him he started spouting insults for no reason (he's a member of the cheater club we used to play with a couple of years ago).

Okay, I guess :D

 
I parked my car in the shadow and the when we got back it said 35°! Way too fucking much for me.


Heroic, I'd call it quits at 25.

I took 4 litres of water today but only got to drink 2 since we got into a literal fire-fight before the end of the day, and our priorities changed rather sharply.

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Hot..i'd say, but managed to get to around 15:30 before started to suffer real bad effects...and this is with having 3ltrs of water & sportsdrnks to get electrolites into me.  Sat in the car at the end with air-con on..got out to talk to someone, and immediately got real bad cramping in the thighs. (To much salt loss today)  Considering i'm 47 and younguns quit hours earlier due to the heat..I thought I did rather well. :)

Good day and had fun being a sneaky bastard with my Wolverine MTW...getting to places the enemy team didn't expect an attack from...and the new Daniel Defence "Repo" stock is good. (To a risk getting it from China)

View attachment 75092

 
I had a decent day, even though I couldn't use the VSR as the battery connectors needed fixing (they're fixed now and reinforced with a bunch of electrical tape!). We played a long game across the whole morning and I got a good number of kills from my hide next to one of the objectives, even after it got completely overrun and I repositioned to start shooting the enemy in the back. However, I think my days using the ghillie are numbered; if it was much warmer, I'd have dropped it as I was pretty damn warm wearing it today!

However, I found that I'm really not used to using 1J guns, as I would get into a hide with my m14 and lament at the shots I could've made with the VSR that I just couldn't with the m14. I don't think I had anyone within my usual 30m MED once through the whole day, which made the fact I had no MED (as the m14 is 1J) a moot point.

Next skirmish day I'm looking forward to using the VSR again. It's a much lighter-weight loadout than the m14 as the VSR is lighter and I don't need a chest rig as everything fits on the belt.

 
The day didn't start too well, with me deciding not to carry the aap smg and a teammate tripping and bashing his side torso quite hard on an exposed root on the 2nd game.

Nothing serious but he got us worried for at least 30 seconds.

Games went relatively well despite the heat and humidity being annoying, didn't play a single defense which is unusual for me (I try to play at least 70/30 just to have some variety).

 
Pretty decent day yesterday.  As statused, it started poorly with an s-hop in my new DMR build that was protruding slightly into the barrel and skying BBs even with no hop applied (and even with the hop arm removed).  So it was back to the G36 for the morning, all good.

Fortunately I'd brought the box-o-bits and swapped in a Maple Leaf and regular arm and nub over lunch, and got it dialled in nicely. DMR suits the way I like to play, I've never been one for sending clouds of BBs downrange - but can still do so with Mr Full Auto Sidearm if necessary.

View attachment 75344

On that, I'm coming round to the conclusion that airsoft guns have got so good that they're making play less fun.  Pushing into solid streams of laser-like BBs gets old pretty quickly.  We had fairly low numbers, which made for fewer BBs in the air and a better day for everyone.

 
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On that, I'm coming round to the conclusion that airsoft guns have got so good that they're making play less fun.  Pushing into solid streams of laser-like BBs gets old pretty quickly.
Yup, although for me they are taking the skill element out of the equation.

Back then, we used to overcome the opponent with skills, whether it was about camouflage, or picking the right moment to fire or going for a giga flanking manoeuvre.

Now though, with all the "pay to win" plug and play r-hopped barrels, people are more inclined to sit behind the same tree for 20 minutes plinking at each other from hyperbolic distances, effectively making games more static.

 
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