Trolling the Forums

When I first started playing paintball in the late '90s, I was introduced to a group of players who literally taught me the game. Their paintball knowledge in turn came from other players at local fields, store owners and random players they'd met while playing the sport. Getting a valuable tidbit of paintball knowledge usually required listening to more experienced players for seemingly hours on end.  There was no central hub for paintball and it was common to receive contradictory information literally from one day to the next.

With the advent of the internet, paintball finally found a centralized location to share information. Rather than having these stories shared only between a handful of players in the staging area of a local field, these same conversations have now been immortalized on the internet in printed form. Now a curious player has literally millions of threads to read about literally every aspect of the sport. Whether its rumors, debates about guns, questions on tinkering or simply sharing stories of games played, paintball forums make it so beginning players can immerse themselves in the world of paintball without leaving their own home.

There are dozens of paintball-centric forums around the web that cover the whole sport or even focus on smaller aspects of it such as one brand of paintball gun. The largest include PBNation.com and mcareterbrown.com while one of my personal personal favorites is automags.org. These forums are a great resource to ask questions and learn from more experienced players, but the archived threads are a treasure of information. The information still must be gleaned as you read through countless inane comments, but useful information is almost always there to find.