Delta Force Paintball - Appin

So, I went paintballing again for someones 21st yesterday at DeltaForce paintball, at their Appin location in NSW, just south of Campbelltown.

I must say, their facilities and course, along with the packages available, were pretty ordinary.

First impressions of the place was pretty mundane, a tin shed with loud obnoxious music blaring in the side of a light forest environment with zero signage on the main road leading in is pretty bad. Its very easy to shoot past the entrance road to the place from the main road, very lacking in clear signs and direction.

Once you head inside, the appearance of the place is also quite ordinary, just a counter bench with racks of masks and packs, a single fridge and some lockers, with a marshalling area. In the marshalling area are some picnic tables, and a small toilet block (for the male toilet it was 2 stalls, 1 urinal, 2 sinks, on tank water, personally I would say it was non-potable water).

You get overalls and a chest vest standard along with a waist velcro horizontal 4 pod pack (very old and crappy pack and crappy pods that were extremely hard to close and open, in terrible condition. The velcro on the packs had gone to crap also, and during gameplay several people and me inclusive had pods fall out due to the velcro not holding, so either lost paint from pods opening up on impact, or completely losing pods and not realising it. Lame.)and a fully enclosed mask (very dirty lenses, they 'wash' them every day is the claim for the reason why the straps are wet, but they are in terrible visual condition. I can accept that they would be scuffed up and scratched etc, but clean they were not. Especially if out on the field all they do is use a ratty towel to wipe with), along with an Inferno field Mk2 (http://www.arrow-precision.com/infernos.html) that has probably seen slightly better days (hoppers with bad lids, with chunks of plastic broken off lids, hinges that came off the hopper completely like mine did at one point when I was trying to field reload, and these markers jammed incredibly easy, not a single game went by that I didn't have to clear the chamber manually).

They supply paint to you either in pods filled (lots of 100) or bulk (in multiples of 500 as the boxes of 2000 are split as 4x 500 bags inside). Lockers are supplied at $5 with a $1 refund upon return of key, while gloves and cups are available for purchase also. For those who have glasses, they offer half-visor masks, but this was not told to me until the end of the day when I commented about spending the day without my glasses on.

Course-wise, the terrain maps were reasonable, nothing spectacular but most courses are like that. The maps used in our session was Speedball (old barrels and a big gas tank, set up like a tournament speedball with inflatables), London (old double-decker bus with phone pill boxes), Tomb Raider (timber and fibreglass pyramid with sphinxes), Graveyard (big sarcophagi that they called crypts, technically incorrect since you can't actually enter these if they were real, with big gravestones of wood that had cross-shaped spaces cut out of the middle) and Prison (timber huts with lookout towers you couldn't get into with mesh fencing and hay bales).

Game wise, we had speedball (team deathmatch), capture the flag (where you had to take the flag to the opposing team's base), domination (most players touching the sarcophagi at the end time), deathmatch (every person for themselves, they called it total annihilation but that was pretty lame actually), and tomb raider (4 blocks of 'gold' in the pyramid, 1 person is designated raider, only they can take the gold, must take gold back to base and you can raid opposing base, end of time most gold wins). The best one I felt was tomb raider, the worst was total annihilation.

Tomb raider worked pretty well as you could bunker down and cover for your raider, while at the same time allowed you to push around the map to contain and retrieve gold from the opposition if needed, very dynamic if your team was willing to do some teamwork since only the raider is allowed inside the pyramid.

Total annihilation was utter crap as it was a free-for-all melee with everyone on the day (i.e. people who weren't part of your group) and you only had 10 seconds to scatter in a TINY space (for the number of people involved, it was the London map) before the paint went flying. I personally got 2 before my marker jammed and I got nailed, but it was over very quickly for most people, before those remaining had a long standoff while everyone stood around and waited. It literally took about 10min for the game to be setup and start, about 20 seconds of play for 90% of people, then another 5 minutes of waiting before we headed back to the marshalling area to wait again before the next game. Worst game they did.

In terms of service, lunch was domino's pizza from the local pizza joint like 20 minutes away. It wasn't hot when it arrived since it was so far away to get to the paintball location, and had to be ordered at the start of the day or prior to the day, I don't know how much it cost but I ponder if the paintball place placed additional cost on the pizza for their commission/profit. The counter staff took ages to process (a good 3-4min to give me 50c change) a purchase of water ($3.50 for a 600mL bottle of spring water, $3.00 for 365mL Coca-cola varieties, $5.00 for 600mL powerade).

In terms of marshalling, the marshalls were terrible at it. You couldn't hear them (no whistles or signals, just their weak voices), unprofessional behaviours (dry-firing rapidfire bursts at people, threatening to shoot people in the neck, not knowing the rules to the games to be played and deciding then and there what to use as rules, forgetting game rules while explaining), and just in general didn't really make them well suited to the role. I felt that they were people who where just players standing around watching a game of paintball, rather than actual marshalls.

Overall, while it was an okay experience, I felt that this place could have done a lot better. Experience wise for those who have never played paintball, it's enough to know what paintball is, but isn't really a great experience to know what paintball could be like at its best. Some small changes and improvements could be done and they would probably be a much better venue.