This is the continuation of the paintball player survey recently conducted to help the Paintball Association of Victoria gauge the thoughts of tournament players. We covered the first 5 questions out of 10. If you have not had a look at the first 5 questions results click here for part 1.
Recently Victorian Paintball players were asked to complete a 10 question survey on tournament paintball in Victoria.
I will be running through the details here and adding some thoughts. The raw data will be unchanged but some clarification and context will be added where it helps. I will also be adding some thoughts where they are relevant also.
Read More
The Future of Tournament paintball part 2. For Part one click here
Money
Money…. Probably the hardest to do anything about. But once you look a little closer there are a few factors that we can look at.
Th GFC caused a lot of problems for paintball. Not just paintball in America but Europe and Australia as well. Paintball is an easy thing to give up when money is tight. The flip side of this is that when economies are strong the sport grows. With consumer confidence in the USA and Australia growing we should start to see players either returning or starting i the sport.
The recovery has not really started to come into effect yet however. In the USA the Google searches for paintball has dropped progressively since the start of the GFC. (refer below)
- Paintball searches in the USA over time
Australian Paintball search stats are a little more forgiving but the trend is still negative. Australian searches are being propped up by the fact that the structure of the industry here makes it more conducive to work groups, bucks parties and birthdays.
So what makes tournament paintball so expensive? Paintball markers are pretty cheap when you you look at the second hand market. Facebook makes it easy to purchase paintball clothing including paintball masks interstate or internationally second hand. There are also plenty of Melbourne paintball players that sell gear on Facebook. The field fees to train are relatively inexpensive and are pretty widely available. Considering all of these the biggest expense is the paintballs.
Now this seems like something we have little control of and to a degree this is right. The margins on paintballs for licensed players is very low and the price is at the whim of the AUD/USD exchange rate. So what options do we have?
When you look at NSW where there are a significantly more active teams there only seems to be one major difference in the way things are done…. Ramping. To understand ramping I have added an explanation here.
The main advantage with Ramping from a financial standpoint is that it caps the rate of fire that is possible during a tournament. While it becomes easier to achieve most players are likely to shoot less paintballs and therefore compete for a lower price. As a side note ramping is used in other states and countries and it would also allow players to compete more easily in other states.
The other barrier at the moment is the cost of purchasing equipment when initially entering the sport. One way we have started helping in this area is by making it easier for new players to access second hand equipment. Players have already started donating used gear to a pool that new players can use or buy cheaply to get into the sport. Any money made from selling the gear is then used to help build and promote entry level players getting involved.
If you have any ideas on how to build the sport, want to get involved or have gear to donate contact us on our Facebook page or google+
Victorian paintball has gone through a number of changes in the last 20 or so years. It all started with pump action paintball markers out in the bush and we are now at the point where we are playing on the same layouts as teams on the other side of the world with paintball markers capable of 20+ paintballs per second.
For the last 5 years however the rules and formats of paintball have consolidated leading to a period of stability in the sport from a competition point of view. Sadly during this period the amount of people competing in paintball tournaments in a regular basis in Vic has dropped significantly.
It peaked in around 2012 when 28 teams participated in PAVs – now called Vic 5s hosted by Snipers Den Paintball Melbourne. Last round of Vic 5s we had 12 teams total. And this was the equal max for the season. So it is evident that there are issues recruiting new players, holding onto existing players or perhaps a little of both. After chatting to players, field owners and other event organisers and a few trends seem to keep coming up.
Victorian paintball competition in action
Age limit
The legal age for paintball in Victoria is 18 and over. Obviously most sports do not have an age restriction and this forms a big part of how they recruit players. When look at organisations such as Auskick for AFL football it is evident that this has a big part in recruiting players to the sport and fostering long term retention of the players.
The legislation is looking like it will change the paintball age limit to 16+ in early 2015. Hopefully this will help but we will still be chasing our tails unless it lowers a little further. Assuming the age limit lowers it will also depend on how the legislation is enforced from the perspective of paintball licenses. The best guess currently is that people under the age of 18 will not be able to hold a paintball license. This is only based on the implementation of other firearm categories and hopefully is a little more lenient than that but we will need to see how it occurs.
Once we do have under 18’s around the sport players will need to make adjustments also. As a sport that has been restricted to 18+ for a long long time it may require adjustments to the culture and appropriate language. If paintball in Melbourne to be taken seriously as a sport we need to represent ourselves as such. Younger players are going to bring parents and families and this influx of paintball players could easily dry up if we scare off the new source of paintball competitors.
Conclusion: Lowering of the age limit will be a great boost to tournament paintball but we need to be careful to represent our sport professionally when this happens.
In the USA there is no official minimum age for paintball
For more read on to part 2 here….
Ramping is a term used in the tournament paintball but most people outside the tournament paintball community (and probably some Melbourne Paintball players) may not have heard about it and may not be clear as to what it means.
To make it easier to book please follow the instructions below.
We will not be allowing not paying tournament players to attend the venue. This is obviously a truly closed session.
First step to booking a paintball clinic – Click “Book Now”
Click on the 29/11/14 and “Training Clinic”
Fill in your details – Group name and reason not important
To confirm the booking you need to pay in full. I will hold spot using the deposit setting but only for a few days.
The story of Snipers Den paintball Melbourne goes back much further than the 5 years we have been open. As the founder of Snipers Den I think it may add some clarity for our customers to understand what is important to us as a business and why we strive to be the best paintball field in Melbourne.
Back in 2001 I began working at a paintball field in Victoria. Paintball is a great weekend job and I had a ball.
Even at that early stage I felt that there was a lack of customer service and quality being delivered in the industry.
Given the small amount of paintball fields within Victoria, customers had fewer options to chose from. Unfortunately back then, the lack of customer focus for these fields did not seem to have much impact on the bottom line for these paintball operators.
In addition to this, the layout and construction of Melbourne paintball fields were also very basic. Typical fields were constructed of piles of tyres and old septic style pipes and pallets. As you can see, there was certainly room for improvement in the quality of the fields and customer service approach.
By 2003, any opportunity for improvement to the quality of the paintball fields was stopped short. A dramatic move by the Victorian Government of the time saw an update to the legislation, effectively prohibiting paintball fields from accepting customers without a paintball license. The Victorian Paintball industry closed down overnight.
With the Paintball Melbourne industry essentially dead, 2 fields sprang up very quickly over the Victorian border into NSW. In spite of this paintball fans and customers weren’t deterred – many driving the 4hrs to the border to play. What most people didn’t realise was that there were actually 2 fields across the border – within about 1km of each other.
Significant differences were evident across the 2 fields however.
The first field invested very heavily in the construction of their fields, selection of their equipment and infrastructure designed to support their customers. The second field did not.
I believe that this was the first time that I recognized the benefits in investing in a quality experience for customers. I saw the impact that was had on the customers experience when they sought the services of a venue that had severely restricted investment in both the development of the fields and the equipment provided. The pursuit of low cost options for the owner, undermined the awesome fun customers could have when playing paintball. Unfortunately customers were still charged the same as those attending other fields, in spite of the lack of service. This appreciation still remains with me to this day.
In 2006 the laws for Paintball Victoria changed, allowing general customers to play paintball again in Victoria. I worked in this local industry for a brief period.
The fields that hadn’t run for years opened almost immediately. Sadly there was initially no change to the quality of the venues setups and they essentially continued trading as they had done before the law change in Victoria.
At this point a new generation of paintball field began to enter the Victorian market.
Many of these companies evolved from businesses that initially marketed on behalf of other paintball fields. You may have seen these venues advertising Melbourne paintball experiences in shopping centres and door-to-door to your house or business.
For the record – Snipers Den Paintball Melbourne is an independent paintball field and hates this practice as much as many people would. We feel that this form of forced selling can at times be misleading, if not deceptive, and has caused many people to have a negative association with paintball around Victoria. As a result Snipers Den paintball is fiercely independent and does not take part in what we see as a very negative practice.
In 2008 we started work on developing our very own Melbourne paintball field. It took almost 12 months to get approval, finally opening the doors by August 2009. With the way the market was laid out, and drawing on my previous experience, the Snipers Den team decided to change the approach and attempt to shake up the industry a little.
By focusing on customer service, quality staff and the best themed fields we were seen as a unique option in the market. With Snipers Den refusing to follow the other venues down the road of direct marketing in shopping centres and door-to-door we were immediately at a large disadvantage from a marketing perspective.
Although this caused us to have a slower start to our competitors, it led to massive repeat business and a referral market from happy customers. People loved to play paintball in Melbourne at Snipers Den. Year on year we have had more people play paintball at Snipers Den, and this continues to grow. And this, in an industry that we are told is declining!
Make sure you bring your next group to Snipers Den paintball and find out for yourself why we are the best option for Melbourne paintball.
What do you look for when choosing a venue? Staff? Gear? Price? Tell us below….
Snipers Den Paintball Melbourne is on the verge of announcing the next evolution in paintball games.
We will soon be introducing the Melbourne paintball community to a new option for paintballing in Melbourne.
At Snipers Den Paintball Melbourne we understand how hard it is to put a group together.
Very soon we will be putting together a VIP membership for Snipers Den Paintball Special Ops.
It will include –
Special packages available only to Special ops members. These will apply even when playing as part of another group.
Access to closed Special OPs sessions.
Access to training normally reserved for Catagory P paintball licence holders.
Special competitions and prizes. There will also be a into pack with exclusive gear.
More details will be published as we put them together nut prepare for a shakeup to how you play paintball….
Miniball, Splatball, underage paintball – there are many names people are using to describe it.
Whichever name you want to run with, it seems that we are probably the last paintball in the field to not start running the “underage paintball”. Particularly in school holidays we seem to constantly get calls from parents looking to have their kids have a go at paintball in Melbourne.
Before we get into the reasons that we are not running this form of paintball – lets start by looking at the differences in the 2 types of “paintball” that are being run at the moment.
1. Miniball or SplatballThere is no official name for this type of game and I hesitate to use the word paintball to describe it. All operators running the same “guns” to run their games. The reason that this form of paintball has been unrestricted in terms of age is that Victoria Police who enforce the laws relating to paintball have confirmed that they do not consider them a paintball marker as defined in the legislation.
Victoria Police gave a few reasons that they are not defining the splatmaster as a paintball marker.
a. They do not have a gas bottle – so their is no “stored energy”b. The velocity is much lower than regular paintball
c. The fact that they are made of plastic makes serial numbers very difficult to maintain.
The splatmaster guns look like the pic below. They also fire a paintball of about half the volume at 1/3 velocity on average.
An example of the “Splatmaster” paintball guns used to run underage groups.
2. Real Paintball
Proper paintball uses very different equipment. Over the last 10 years most Melbourne Paintball fields have used Tippmann 98 markers although there has been a shift to a the FT-12 and the BT Slice. At Snipers Den we were one of the first paintball fields in Melbourne to use the FT-12s and we use them for many of our groups that play with us.
As opposed to the “miniball” guns paintball guns are designed to shoot up to 300 feet per second and have an effective accurate range of over 70m. They also shoot a much larger paintball – over double the volume of the other type.
An example of a paintball marker used for full paintball
Issues…
The main reason that we did not chose to go down the road of the underage paintball in because we did not want to put our name behind a product that we couldn’t stand behind. The online feedback for the underage version of paintball so far has been pretty horrible. The experience is never going to be the same as the real thing but many businesses are still willing to offer an inferior version of the game.
One issue is that the reduced velocity and volume of the paintballs dramatically reduces the distance and accuracy of the shot. Sadly these issues make them closer to a nerf dart gun than to a paintball gun. And with some paintball Melbourne fields charging up to $1 per paintball it is very different to the $15 per 100 we charge for regular paintball.
The last thing we want is for first time paintballers to play with splatmaster paintball guns and judge the experience from that experience. They are certainly words apart. With the age limit of paintball expected to drop to 16 in early 2015 we have decided to wait until then to introduce customers to the real thing instead of pushing an inferior version.
If you have your heart set on the underage version of paintball please do your homework and read the online feedback of the business before you book. Also make sure you look at the price for extra ammo – there is a massive difference in the quality and price of venues.
Thanks for reading – Matt
For paintball in Melbourne it is a great time of year. The days are getting warmer and longer. Saturday night the clocks move an hour forward and we lose an hour of hard earned sleep.
That means that if you want a paintball Melbourne experience we can begin to make use of the extra daylight. So get your group together after work and book in a twilight session.
In the colder months we have made many changes to the fields and improved several of the paintball games we play on them. Even if you have played with us before come down and have a fresh experience.
The midweek pricing does still apply for twilight paintball session so get in touch and let us show you what paintball is really all about.
Remember that Snipers Den is a leader in tournament paintball in Melbourne. Let us show you why the best Melbourne Paintball players play with us over all other paintball fields!
See you soon!