If you can manage to make a living out of something you enjoy and run it as a successful business then that's great. I have no doubt, Shadlad, that people coming to your site have good time and benefit from your love for the game. But do you have any plans to expand and grow your business? If you had say 20 sites and wanted to attract 8-10+k players a week how would you do so without using proven marketing techniques? You'll also need staff for all of your sites, possibly another 1000 staff..and staff will come and go and need training and monitoring etc. Now it becomes harder to keep that close-knit 'family' feel. You may still run your business for the love of the game but will each of your 1000 staff also have your passion? Unfortunately that's the way business is. The bigger a business gets the more it loses touch with the origins of it's foundation. Incidentally, DF is still headed by a 'retired' paintballer and has many tourney players working for them. Many of them have a passion for the game, inc me, funnily enough..
As for my comments being bollocks, i have tried to explain what happened in Norwich but it's obviously falling on deaf ears. This was an inexperienced seller who shouldn't have been there and the person responsible for allowing him there was fired. Training didn't come into it because he wasn;t an IPG employee. This is what i have been told first hand by IPG, it's not forum gossipmongering. Everyone who wanted refunds got refunds (incidentally, anyone buying a book of tickets has a 7-day cool off period in which to change their mind and a full refund will be issued if they decide not to keep the tickets). We accept the ticket sellers are not infallable but we do have a process whereby people who are dissatisfied with the tickets can get their money back or if they have encountered another problem but still want to use the tickets we often give them some free paintballs to compensate. We're not the ogres you are trying to make out we are. the person who contacted me on here recently 'K-TOD' is now happily booked in at the site/day of her choice and has 800 free paintballs (saving of £42) as a 'sorry for the inconvenience'. Her problem was that her popup blocker was not allowing her to book on the IPG site.
Anyhow. I think i'm going to leave this thread now as i think i've answered all valid questions. It's just dragging on now and getting repetitive, which makes boring reading.
Happy New Year to all. Gups