This weekend I went to my first full-fledged scenario game, Red Mars by Fledgling Scenarios in Agate, CO. The schedule was registration/air/paint/chrono opening at 4PM Friday, a Tiberius sponsored pistol duel competition at 5pm Friday, real chrono opening Sat 6:30 AM, game time at around 9:30AM Sat, play through midnight or so Sat, game on again Sun AM with final battle early Sun afternoon. As this was my first real scenario game I made sure to read up on the rules and GRSP before hand so I had a pretty good idea what was going on. I played on the Red team, with no special role. I'm hoping some other MCB'ers who were there can chime in and contribute (especially any on the Green side), since after I've written this I feel it's pretty negative and it's based on my experience alone.
People: 10+/10 This is an easy one. Overall I was VERY impressed with the players at this event. From what I saw there was all around good sportsmanship, no real cheating that I saw (there were a couple of "dead man talking" guys but I guess that's to be expected), people were all friendly and there to have fun. The pistol challenge went pretty well (aside from technical issues I'll talk about in "Organization" below) and people were shaking hands, congratulating on good shots, etc. Definitely a nice change from SoCal, the agg capital of the USA. It was great to meet a couple of fellow MCBers, Mstrtal and hmudd13!
Location: 3/10 Wow. Agate CO is about as close to BFE as you can get. There's no town there to speak of aside from a school, post office, and a couple small houses. Not even a gas station or a quick stop; the nearest civilization is 10-15 miles away. The "paintball field" is literally cow pastures, complete with prolific "landmines" of the stinky variety which I thankfully managed to avoid. Aside from a couple of small copses, there were literally no trees or bushes to speak of on the field or surrounding it. The pond with land-bridge was a nice, except the surrounding terrain made it either impossible or danger-free to utilize, depending on which side you were on. Unfortunately the lack of vegetation and flat land provided no wind break at all, and there were 15-20mph gusts regularly blowing along the field toward and away from each team, making long-balling either prevalent or virtually impossible depending on which side you were on. Normally I wouldn't hold weather against an event, but on the first night I was told by a regular that it's pretty much always windy there. The only thing I actually liked about this field was that parking/registration/air/paint/chrono/crappers were all very close together, so it was quick and painless to take care of pre-game minutiae without trekking back and forth to the car for an hour. I guess it's reasonably close to Denver (~40 min drive @ 80mph) which is about the same drive I was used to in CA.
Vendors: 1/10 From what I saw, there was a whopping 1 vendor...no local stores, no companies (I figured at least Tiberius would have a rep there since they sponsored the pistol duels..), etc. To top it off, the one vendor was the guy with the lawn-dart paint "grenades"!
Being a douche, I went up to the table and nonchalantly asked the guy what insurance thought about his product, and his response was a "gee, I dunno" shrug. I asked him about safety if people got hit in the noggin with them, and he did have foam tips (about 1/8" thick) which would go over the impact point of the "grenade", that he'd give to a buyer, however he wouldn't install them himself. After seeing these in person, they are cool but no way in hell would I allow them at my field or event for safety's sake. I also let the guy know that the dude in his video scared the crap out of me..I guess it's a friend of his who's an actor...and that many people have busted his balls about the video. Aside from paint and air (4500 air and CO2, no 12 grams that I saw), I didn't see that the producers had anything else available in terms of misc supplies such as o-rings, parts, etc. I also didn't see a spot to purchase common things you might find for sale at a field like barrel bags, squeegees, grenades, etc.
Paint: 9/10 The game was FPO, and they used Origin Signature Series tourney-grade. I found the paint to actually be a little on the large side, which was good, it was a pretty solid fit with a Phantom barrel and no detent rings. The fill was thick and goopy, almost too thick to the point where it was difficult to clean hits between insertions by the time you got to a dead box. $65/case, so not exorbitantly priced, and the case I bought seemed uniform, fresh, and no breaks in the 2 bags I opened. The shells seemed to be pretty solid although somehow I managed to get a break inside each hopper of the Ditto Deuce, making for a sloppy mess due to the thick fill.
Field Setup: 3/10 I was hoping based on the descriptions that the extreme lack of natural obstacles and flat, open terrain would be overcome by the producers, and that there was going to be a significant amount of man-made cover. I hoped poorly. My end of the field was extremely sparsely populated by small plastic bunkers (~2' high by 2' wide by 4' long) and a handful of inflatables, which were completely inadequate when a large charge (or tank) rolled through. Being solid, the plastic bunkers provided adequate cover from a very limited angle, but it was very easy to be flanked. Most of the "cool" man-made cover such as the village and a large tire "fort" was held virtually uncontested by the other team, and I only got to step on about 1/3 of the field. Perhaps the producers placed most of the cover in the middle, expecting it to be contested for most of the game, and perhaps my team was just not aggressive enough at the very beginning to take and hold the important points, but I was very disappointed in the field layout.
Organization: 5/10 I'm torn on this one. Friday night was pretty much a disaster from my standpoint; originally I wasn't sure I was going out as I thought I had to work that day. Turned out I had the day off, so I headed out early to arrive around 3PM. I figured that would give me plenty of time to assemble each of the 5 guns I planned to use over the weekend, do any last minute tech, and be ready to pick up my paint, register, pre-chrono, etc when it opened at 4, and be on the road home by 6 after the pistol duels. I left at 7:30 PM as the sun was starting to set, and the paint truck had yet to arrive, nor was there a chrono set up (because apparently the producers figured no one could unofficially chrono without field paint
) Another comment about paint, is that if you paid for paint while registering, you were given a typical tear-off coupon style ticket, which you'd then exchange for one case with the guy manning the trailer. While the tickets were numbered, it wasn't obvious that they were recording in the computer that "X buyer bought Y cases of paint"; losing that 1" by 1/2" ticket would be a pricy problem, especially overnight. The pistol duels went reasonably well, although they required the use of their Tac8's (presumably due to being sponsored by Tiberius), and they only had 2 available. There were quite a few technical difficulties, and the ultimate match of the winning player vs Psycho, one of the Fledgling guys, didn't end up happening because one of the guns went down. They also had spectators calling hits instead of event staff, which created a lot of confusion, and could have caused impropriety as many of the spectators were team mates of people participating in the duels. Saturday seemed to be running very smoothly on the other hand, there was a minimal line for paint/air/chrono, nothing more than you'd expect to see at a regular field. The game itself seemed to be run OK, ref coverage might have been a little light but I'm not sure what to expect at this sort of event.
Overall Experience: Considering the fact that I bailed halfway through the first day, I'd say that I came away from this experience very disappointed. Really the biggest contributor to this was the awful field and layout coupled with the one-sided play; after so many futile charges through open territory, I just got sick of racking up bounce-welts from the other side's wind-assisted longballs, and felt that doing something else with the remainder of my weekend was more valuable to me than continuing to play. I only participated in a couple of missions, which were "take and hold" or "take", however they were basically a group of us getting shot up trying to achieve something instead of a group of us getting shot up just trying to move up the field. I also found there was a lot of waiting around, be it waiting for a mission, standing in the field trying to figure out what pointless target to attack, or just walking back and forth to the insertion point. I'd like to think that the field setup only seemed as bad as it was because the teams were just poorly balanced, but I don't know if I buy that, and even so the producers could probably have done a better job setting the field up to be resistant to one side getting rolled. I'll probably give scenario ball another shot, but if this is a typical experience I can confidently say that scenario games are not for me.