Is BPS BS? - A look at ROF in the woods

A lot of jawing goes on between speedballers and woodsballers over the importance of BPS. However the argument that always perplexes me is that Speedball relies only on the amount of paint an individual can throw, their BPS, ROF whatever you want to call it. Now I’m not going to pretend like there was not a period of my paintball career where just the very utterance of inflatables made me cringe, but after being around the sport more I realized that there were times where a higher ROF was useful in the woods. However that brought me back to a question I’ve debated since I’ve been playing paintball….is BPS BS?

In the beginning as I stated earlier I thought that shooting a whole lot was what the tournament players did to make up for their lack of skill and strategy. That by covering such a small field with as much paint as possible the would had a higher chance of winning and that’s all the game was about. Eventually I learned that there were 15 bps caps and so it didn’t matter if your gun could shoot 200 bps it was going to be capped. After watching people play, and playing more myself I slowly began to see that we shoot a lot of paintballs in the woods too, it just seems like less because the games are longer and there is so much ground to cover that we are not in constant battles. As I played more and more woodsball I realized that if I shot one ball at a guy he would pop up and try to shoot me again, and if I shot 5 balls at him it would take him longer. So the more paint you sling at someone the less willing they are to move and I don’t think anyone will argue with that.

Later down the line I was a general at the Gorilla game at PVM in Ohio. As the 5 star one of my biggest objectives was simply not to die. Well I chose to set up fort in a tower which ended up being the enemy’s objective which led to waves and waves of men trying to take it from me. I sat in the tower and the first few waves almost killed me. I was trying to pick them off while they moved and kill them with single shots like I do when I sneak up on people. Quickly I realized that this was not going to work and that if I really wanted to hold them off for the remaining two hours, I needed to slow them down. So I started firing more and more which not only did it slow their movement almost to a halt but I got many lucky shots which resulted in forcing them to retreat and re-enforce.

Since than I’ve encountered other one on many situation and understood that BPS could be a useful tool and since then have kept it in my back pocket just incase I got into a bad situation. Think about all the many scenario games we have all played. When on defense its good to have a high ROF to better slow the enemy down, or if you see a large group of people running at once you can use a “spray and pray” approach to the issue. Also if you’re a dagger running out in the middle of the open it is nice to be able to scare people down when your moving. I’m sure we could think of more examples if we tried, but I think ya’ll get my point.

So in conclusion BPS is NOT just for speedball. Just to clarify I have a Marq 7 with four eyes, Tadao board and tons of bells and whistles it can shoot as fast as the hopper you have (so over 30 bps) yet even so I have it capped at 14 because while I do think bps is useful there is a limit. There is NO reason to have greater than 15 as think about it 200 rounds at 15 rounds a second and you can shoot for 13 seconds before you need to reload. If your using HPA especially with a Tippmann you might not be able to shoot more than 1000 rounds on a tank anyways. So with the increase of BPS comes the need for finger control even more than using something that can shoot 5 bps.

So with that in mind try to find the balance, know when you just need to use one or two shots and know when it’s ok just to unload… just make sure you have some full pods!!!

New beginnings

So I always find myself holding somewhat of an opinion about almost everything in general however something I have found myself extremely close to is the wonderful sport of paintball. Now as you have probably figured out by the name of the page I play scenario paintball, this is not to be mistaken with woods ball which I classify as speedball in the woods. I keep talking to many individuals who seem to have the two confused so I would like to start off from the start and say there is a difference. Scenario paintball has been slowly coming back over the past few years mostly with the Special Ops Paintball (www.specialopspaintball.com) revolution, yet the problem I see with this site is while they do have articles and tips on paintball they often only write suggesting how you need their products to have success in a scenario game. Don’t get me wrong I love special ops paintball they have brought a lot to the table for scenario paintball yet I always want something more. I often find myself at www.pbreview.com looking at gear and trying to find someone who wants to have an intelligent discussion on paintball fields, equipment, or even paint its self yet for every good comment or discussion I enter another twenty “flames” are guaranteed. The actual amount of information for a beginning scenario player is very limited and to sift through the amount of garbage that is out there consumes time. A dad who wants to look at playing paintball with his kids doesn’t want to see a post called “Paintball for Beginners” and than search through hundreds of posts that say “Come to my field and I will light you up n00b!” So after posting my own, comments, posts, and reviews on various sites I thought about how I could give back to the paintball community. After various discussions with my Uncle George he suggested that if I was having such a problem voicing my opinions on the forums why not make my own blog where I could post the link and share my ideas with others. I decided what a fabulous idea and here we are.

If you have managed to make it this far let me say a few things. I am not by any means a paintball guru, there are many people who have been playing the game longer than I have and know more about general paintball. If these people would like to post on this site and share their knowledge please email me and I would love to have you share you opinions. Yet I am also going to be drawing from my own unique staff, my Uncle George and Cousin Phillip. Hopefully if you re-visit this site, and read our articles you can find information, resources, and articles to make you think. With all of this in mind let us start writing and see where we go from here!