UCAP Vendetta HMP Gloucester

[DopeYourScope]

I’ll start by saying I’ve never really done proper CQB only a couple of evenings at Battle Sector X so to go and play airsoft in a prison especially at night was fun and disorientating to say the least. 
 
Myself and 3 friends made the trip to UCAP Vendetta the weekend just gone; the site is the former Cat. B men’s prison HMP Gloucester. We left Kent early as we had to trek the majority of the width of England and knowing M25 traffic it was decided to leave earlier; we arrived on site about 5:30 which was a tad early I was pleasantly surprised by a nice large indoor safe-zone with proper toilets. 
 
THE SAFEZONE  

It appears to be their reception and café area for all their events and it had large tables enough for those of us doing the Saturday evening. There was one thing that my group noticed, which was a couple of cases of dry firing in the safezone there weren’t any accidents luckily but it’s just one of those things. I made no mention to the staff of it because I didn’t deem it necessary at the time.   
The following Sunday there wasn’t really enough room for everyone and it was a case of find space where available but everyone crammed in. Sunday lunch was included which went down well and Saturday evening dinner was available for a small cost. 

BRIEFINGS 

On saturday night it was mostly experienced airsofters the safety brief was nice and concise and we got into games quite quick; the chap running UCAP (Andy) has a bit of banter with everyone (More on this later) during the game briefing and they were very informative with big maps across the site showing the names of the buildings and necessary points to be remembered. 

Sunday was a longer safety brief due to numbers but still shorter than other briefings I’ve heard. 

 
Andy was having a bit of banter with everyone not only in the safezone but during the briefing and it came to light afterwards that someone had messaged UCAP and said they were offended by what was said (I assume they had someone under 18 present due to the post). I heard nothing I would deem over the top and unnecessary or rude and myself and Andy were bantering each other on the saturday night and I had only just met the bloke so I don’t know what was heard but this was their “official” response.  

 

 

 

GAMEPLAY & SITE 

The site is incredible and even more fun and disorientating as a first timer in the dark. I had managed to walk right up to a doorway to the enemy re-gen without knowing and waited for them till 6 came through at once. 
 
corridors, cells, offices and all manner of other rooms and buildings you could go in and explore as well as the courtyards (including an Ex police helicopter) we left Sunday afternoon and couldn’t still fully remember our ways round it was that much of a labyrinth. 

 

The majority of the game play on Saturday night was stellar, great hit taking (throughout the weekend) and everyone was having fun.  
I can say I had 3 incidents of game play which were an issue (throughout the weekend) we had one case of blind firing which was dealt with instantly. There was a lot of over shooting, if you’ve got the drop on someone (especially from above) then there’s no need to pelt them with ten bbs in the face- One will do the job, this is something which is incredibly difficult to enforce so it’s not really worth losing sleep over. Finally, was an issue where one team kept moving quite close to the others regen which effectively trapped them causing game play to slow to the point there wasn’t much happening (this could have been remedied by re-sorting the teams at lunch when it was noticed it became stalemated quite often (which was noted by the staff). 

There was a case of players being unprepared for night games by not using dead lights; if you are hit at night it’s a hell of a lot easier to see a red light than a hand, I had my red tinted MS2000 strobe on and didn’t get shot once however I had other players complain they’d been shot whilst dead.  

 

The games themselves were varied between Defenders and attackers getting from a start point to a finish, an infection game, HVT games to straight up last team standing all of which were done in a way to get people moving throughout the site especially in the prison itself. 

Breaks between games were nice and short and staff were pushing everyone back out to play again which was nice to see.  

CONCLUSION 

I would return for another full weekend, to just play the Sunday isn’t really economically viable due to distance however I would recommend it to anyone and everyone.  
I will definitely try UCAP’s other sites when I get the chance because they definitely know how to run one and I think there are a lot of sites whom could learn from this.  

 

[E21A]

Was it on the side day that the site owner (possibly this Andy you mentioned) was showing porn to an underage player? 

 

Also, although swearing/banter can’t be avoided by other players, the staff should not be making inappropriate comments or swearing in front of minors in my opinion. Shows a lack of professionalism. A few jokes and a bit bit of light hearted ribbing is fine, but there is a line that shouldn’t be crossed. 

 

For the the record I couldn’t give a flying fuck about swearing but it’s a different matter for staff. 

 

 

[DopeYourScope]

1 minute ago, E21A said:

Was it on the side day that the site owner (possibly this Andy you mentioned) was showing porn to an underage player? 

Hadn't heard anything about that, any more info I might be able to confirm if I had seen it. From what I had gathered it was due to a few remarks made about female players (who were up for the laugh etc) which someone *not directly related to those being the brunt of the banter at that particular moment* took offence.

[E21A]

3 minutes ago, DopeYourScope said:

Hadn't heard anything about that, any more info I might be able to confirm if I had seen it. From what I had gathered it was due to a few remarks made about female players (who were up for the laugh etc) which someone *not directly related to those being the brunt of the banter at that particular moment* took offence.

 

Most just a rumour I heard, but from a trusted source. 

 

[DopeYourScope]

10 minutes ago, E21A said:

Was it on the side day that the site owner (possibly this Andy you mentioned) was showing porn to an underage player? 

 

Also, although swearing/banter can’t be avoided by other players, the staff should not be making inappropriate comments or swearing in front of minors in my opinion. Shows a lack of professionalism. A few jokes and a bit bit of light hearted ribbing is fine, but there is a line that shouldn’t be crossed. 

 

For the the record I couldn’t give a flying fuck about swearing but it’s a different matter for staff. 

 

 

 

This is one point I can understand when you've got a number of children present however I saw maybe 5 teenagers the youngest would have been atleast 14/15 and we all know they've heard it before and probably use the same if not worse language with their mates. If there were the really young kids who were rentals for a birthday etc. I do agree however there's definitely horses for courses and I'm sure they would have changed their language to suit.

[PureSilver]

Ancient news, but I and a bunch of friends played this site way back in February, at either the or one of the first games UCAP ran there. The site itself was great, the issue was that UCAP seemed to barely know their way around it. The first game was quite literally splitting the teams into squads which visited designated areas of the site to do things like count doors and note landmarks, and bring that information back to the marshals at respawn. I appreciate it's a huge site and they were new to it, but there's a difference between "we're still trialling things" and "your guess is as good as ours". With a site this large, and confusing dead ends and locked doors everywhere, it would have been helpful to have printed maps or floor plans available in advance, rather than turning the entire morning into a cartography flashmob. Fortunately by midway through the day the marshals seemed to have a much better grip on things and the games started to run more smoothly, although the objectives seemed to fall by the wayside in favour of the traditional shooting first and not asking questions at all.

 

It looks to have changed only slightly (there wasn't a helicopter back then!) but I'm glad to see that the issues we had with the game day don't appear to have recurred.

 

On 26/11/2019 at 22:08, E21A said:

Was it on the side day that the site owner (possibly this Andy you mentioned) was showing porn to an underage player? 

 

He's in charge of UCAP, but Gloucester isn't the only prison Andy's intimately familiar with. I would have thought he would know better than to do something like that.

 

On 26/11/2019 at 22:08, E21A said:

Also, although swearing/banter can’t be avoided by other players, the staff should not be making inappropriate comments or swearing in front of minors in my opinion. Shows a lack of professionalism.

 

Agreed. One absolutely horrific game day at the thankfully defunct Phoenix College was enough to convince me that it's better for marshals to keep their stand-up and their briefings separate. We paid to play; if you want to tell dubious jokes, do it in your own time.