Delta Force are not totally evil.
What is often forgotten by paintballers with pricing is that Delta Force is a rental site and has pricing in line with rental prices. Their pricing structure is the same as any other punter price, but they do tend to be a bit higher than independent sites - that is because they really are the national giant complete with national advertising and everyone else has to compete.
Delta Force give people a good day out, and have the resources to put in the infrastructure.
On a site by site basis the service they give is as good as the manager and staff they have there.
Street sellers are valid for the bad reputation. This is now run under the name IPG, which allows them to have inflated ticket prices on the IPG website and the sellers 'discount' the tickets to £6.99 for a book. The £6.99 or whatever they charge the individual on the street goes to the marketing charges (to the shopping centre etc for their pitch and wages to the sellers)
The ticket book gives the buyer the contact details for the booking office and then it costs normal punter prices to book their day and to buy paint
Some street sellers blatantly lie. In the U.K. the IPG/Delta Force sellers (in the majority) don't give the worst lies. Those that do tend to be one off casual sellers, and they result in complaints and refunds.
10 years ago we had a number of street ticket brands, most of which were dodgy tickets sold for any site in the U.K. with no co-operation with the site.
Joe Bloggs bought tickets then arrived at a site, they could get turned away but sites would typically honour the tickets and take the income from paint sales. (All the site lost was the deposit amount and the inability to manage the right number of marshalls)
The other ticket sellers have gone out of business in the U.K., hounded out by Trading Standards.
What this does is cover the marketing costs and make the tickets 'valuable' to the punter. Instead of taking a free flyer and then not bothering to pursue it, or not getting out of bed on game day - the money paid for the ticket motivates the group and turns someone into a group organizer to coordinate and motivate everyone
I have seen things recently online on Facebook about Delta Force tickets in the US. These gave the impression that sellers were selling fake tickets. If that's the case deal with it highlighting to the shopping centre & local authorities etc. But if they are selling valid tickets (and are just hyping them up) then it's marketing
We have small communities of regular players.
As a scenario player I was there in the hey day about 10 years ago, and I was also looking across to US scenario and US / UK tournament paintball which looked to be booming.
On some threads people are saying that UK/European tournaments are in decline, and there are a couple mentions of scenario booming.
There is good stuff going on in scenario, but it's still not how it was in the old days.
I would say that tournament, scenario, magfed all have their numbers, and I feel that walkons are probably where it is at the moment.
There are some solid teams, but that takes money, dedication and travel for scenario, magfed and tournament. Walkons give something local for people to play as often as they can.
The real numbers are in punter play, with people playing only once or a handful of times in their life, whilst some come back again and again.
This is where Delta Force and independent sites shine and are the backbone of paintball
Personnaly here in Salisbury there were local ticket sellers who regularly slandered me. This was either because everyone I knew referred to my team and that if we were given leaflets then we would take a major group to a good site, or the sellers were lieing to pretend to disassociate IPG with the Delta Force name
Abuse was given about me and my team (Task Force Delta) either for some unknown personal reason to hate us, or lies/ignorance about the difference between TFD & DF
I'm no fan of Delta Force, and have never played a DF site. But I know people who have, and they have come back happy
This includes my nephew who had his first paintball experiences with me at walkons scenarios and also running scenario events
He arrived into great quality scenario events in the U.K. run by people such as the Wild Geese, but also came back saying how good Delta Force was on a basic punter day.
Delta Force = national corporate punter / rental sites
IPG = marketing method to sell tickets
UKPBA = pretend association in name only, fake version or the UKPSF
