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Is there ANY shotshow news?


Lone_Bullet

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9mm everything is about the best summary so far.  Still kinda ticked off about G&G's AK9 not being an actual Ak-9 like the prototype LCT had years ago and never went forward with.  Hearing Evike getting sole distribution rights to TAG products also worries me.

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SHOT Show seems to run in cycles.  Awesome show one year with lots of new products.  Meh show the next.  This year was pretty meh.

There was some new stuff from TAG like the RGD5 grenades which are pretty cool.

It just seemed to be lots of race ARs, 9mm ARs (meh) and er...?

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18 hours ago, Gigueand said:

Pretty much no. SHOT Show this year has been pretty underwhelming. All the airsoft "news" involves companies releasing yet more lines of guns with insane acronyms for names not modeled after anything that exists in the real world.

Seems like speedsoft is taking over a bit in the US, which I don't have a issue with in general, but some aspects concern me like the move away from realistic looking kit to brightly coloured guns and gear, and then there's the 'Murder Mags' which seem to be appeared from that side of the airsoft business. I mean really, who thought calling an AR type magazine 'Murder Mags' was a good idea? 🤨 Great looking product named badly imo.
 

Are normal gear and milsim events still going much as before over there?

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3 hours ago, Rob15 said:

Are normal gear and milsim events still going much as before over there?

I think this varies regionally. In my area (the Midwest) there's just not a big enough community to really have much differentiation between players. Or, to put it another way, games will have some speedsofty types, some milsim-types and a whole slew of people in the middle. I have noticed a growth in "speed-sim," running the highest speed "milsim" type gear - Crye JPCs, Opscore helmets, Spiritus Systems - all that lightweight stuff is hugely popular.

Milsim is still pretty huge among a certain set of players. Milsim West (MSW) draws pretty big crowds to events all over the U.S. and really does offer a great experience. 

Shaking my head about the "murder mags" - seems like a great way to draw negative attention to the hobby. Cue the videos of kids being hosed at 45 RPS.

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20 hours ago, Gigueand said:

Shaking my head about the "murder mags" - seems like a great way to draw negative attention to the hobby. Cue the videos of kids being hosed at 45 RPS.

Especially in a country where the phrases 'school shooting' and 'high capacity magazines' are unfortunately frequently used together, they strike me as a product from a paintballer turned speedsofter with no awareness of all the years of the airsoft industry trying to keep a clean image. If ran a normal airsoft retail business I'd refuse to stock them unless they got rid of the big 'Murder Mags' lettering and renamed them to something a bit less inapproriate.

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My impression of US airsoft from spending too much time online:

Driving maybe 3hrs each way to play for 4 hours

Only skirmishing at MSW, 3x a year max

Joining a 'Rusfor' discord group and then coming down with a severe mental illness and becoming an alt-right incel

Getting bullied on reddit for being skinny 

65rps polarstars but clearing rooms with 'bang bang bang bang'

Edit: full on fights between two rival groups of uncles and cousins

Seriously though lots of US airsoft sites seem quite underwhelming - tho ballahack looks really cool,id like to skirmish there 

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1 hour ago, Skarclaw said:

My impression of US airsoft from spending too much time online:

Driving maybe 3hrs each way to play for 4 hours

Only skirmishing at MSW, 3x a year max

Joining a 'Rusfor' discord group and then coming down with a severe mental illness and becoming an alt-right incel

Getting bullied on reddit for being skinny 

65rps polarstars but clearing rooms with 'bang bang bang bang'

Edit: full on fights between two rival groups of uncles and cousins

Seriously though lots of US airsoft sites seem quite underwhelming - tho ballahack looks really cool,id like to skirmish there 

I do have to drive quite a way to play.

I do know a lot of dudes who basically only play at MSW 3 or 4 times a year. I drove 16 hours to play in Mississippi and 8 hours to play in West Virginia.

Your take on RUSFOR is spot on. MANY of the RUSFOR dudes I know are teenage edge-lords.

Bang rules are, fortunately, going the way of the dinosaur in my region. Most event hosts both big and small recognize all the problems they create.

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To be fair, DSG runs were around loonnggg before modern HPA systems. I remember the dudes with Systema PTWs getting the same sort of heat HPA users get nowadays. But, yeah, speed triggers for semi-auto and the like... :(

The whole "problem" of high ROF guns is a non-problem, really. It is as simple as the site telling people they can only use semi-auto. Sites around me went through a couple year period where they were semi-auto only unless the RIF was a SAW or LMG. Personally, I rather liked that as it actually forced people to use SAWs in a way that resembled the "real world." Most of the CQB places that I'm familiar with around me are still semi-auto only unless the players specifically opt for a game or two with full-auto rules. A lot of sites need to step up and offer some customer service - if kids are getting over-shot either in full-auto or even from high ROF semi-auto guns then the site needs to isolate those players and tell them to cool it with the trigger spam or put them with other like players.

I do think a lot of the "joy" of airsoft has gone away. Maybe that is because I've been in the hobby for a long time and have kind of seen and done it all, but I suspect there's also an element of silliness that has died in the community. Airsoft seems to be "serious business" now and there's either a speedsoft "anything to win" mentality or a "MILSIM OR GTFO" mentality. I hardly ever seen anyone running around with weird get-ups or non-M4/AK styled rifles these days. 

My team is sort of notorious in the Midwest for having a "zero-fu**s" goofy attitude, running pink shirts on the 2nd day of the event, that sort of stuff. But that attitude seems few and far between nowadays.

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To be fair theres so many good ootb + affordable AKs + M4s its easy to see why they dominate... i mean we ALL have atleast one of those.. r-right? i agree on the ROF stuff - certainly not something that needs a blanket ban but organisers shouldn't be afraid to step in if someone is taking the p1$$ (this swearing filter is beyond puritan sorry)

I only heard of 'speedsim' yesterday but it sounds bang on what i like (rushing whilst wearing cool gear)

All things considered when it comes to airsoft we have it pretty good here in the UK i think.

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I am quite a bit south from where Gigueand is in our state, and yeah, save for the recent influx of monthly games at a "local" field, I often have to drive across the state either way if I want to visit anywhere else.  The old skirmish games that usually dominated the scene are seen/called pickup games now, which saddens me because that is how I have always seen airsoft as, throw two sides at each other and have fun.  I've grown to like the semi auto unless support replica games, but seeing a kid half my age outpacing my RPK with his hpa'd m4 kinda takes any sort of field play planning  (not to mention most of my replicas either tend to have issues with semi auto or refuse to do so at all).  Likewise I guess my jadedness is getting worse with age. 

The RUSFOR thing drives me nuts since I've been wearing KLMK suits and random gear before it got that image and I still get asked sometimes if I am part of x group.  Of course, now I get R6 siege memes thrown at me.  I would not be surprised if any images of me out there are getting comments in that way. 

While it can be said that the armalite scene has plenty of good/great ootb replicas, I honestly wouldn't say that for kalashnikov variants, at least for field legal fps limits.  From cyma to LCT, most shoot far above field limits and necessitate changing out springs or more, whilst most armalite pattern replicas are built to either be cqb legal or woodland legal by design, or are offered from shops as such.  If anything, I would be impressed if someone importing cymas, lct, etc. actually made an effort to downgrade springs/clean up some of the internals without putting awful trademarks everywhere or only doing so for the tm style takedown replicas.  Whilst G&G and a few others have made an effort to make better built replicas internally (or at least the illusion of), folks are not gravitating towards them over the usual options.

Sorry, just felt like ranting this afternoon.

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I haven't posted my airsoft findings from the show yet, but PTS have an AR midcap coming with huge capacity and a licensed MTEK repro that I'm a fan of.  Handled the G&G No4, seemed nice for a prototype, they've got a GBBr coming with insanely light magazines and a Cobalt AR AEG that actually drops mags automatically if you do the competition thing and their 9mm AK has a rotary hop instead of that silly old slider.

Evike booth had a H9 that honestly looked and felt very decent and Ares slimline/more vertical AR AEG grip motors.. also some kinda kit for TM GBBRs that was cool but I forgot what it was now.  Redwolf had Battle Arms super-trick kits for the TM GBB including the 'Paratrooper' which I thought was pretty impressive.  How much of that is even new to folks I'm not sure, don't keep 100% abreast of the latest airsoft releases.

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On 2/4/2019 at 3:32 AM, Brigg said:

Elite force had an r8 revolver that nobody mentioned for more then a half second, despite it being the only interesting thing there.

I am very excited about this. They reckon sub $100, by the time it gets here it'll be an easy £150 I reckon. We get shafted so bad on airsoft prices.

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On 2/1/2019 at 8:32 AM, Skarclaw said:

Seriously though lots of US airsoft sites seem quite underwhelming - tho ballahack looks really cool,id like to skirmish there 

 

You should give Ballahack a go. I'm there every weekend, as I have been for the past 10 years. Great way to sidestep a lot of the nastiness present in some other US airsoft communities.

 

/offtopic

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You think they've got time to write blogs and make videos for their followers at the one time of year where all this kit is in the same place?  There's too much drinking to be done with all the other celebs.

You really don't need to bother spending ages writing and editing when you've already got tens of thousands of followers.  You can post a single picture on IG with a 12 word caption and get 2500 likes because that's all  95% of the audience can be bothered to consume anyway.  Having an attention span is just incredibly hard.

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