An Opinion on pbRIOT

The folks at Hustle Paintball seem like a nice friendly group of people. But the introduction of pbRIOT makes absolutely no sense to me. As far as I can tell, it is another general interest, all-encompassing, non-niche paintball forum. It's of the exact same format as TechPB, PBN, and several other forums already established. They do have a claim to uniqueness, but it's not exactly valid, "What's unique about pbRIOT, is its manufacturer forums...", this can be said for PBN, M. Carter Brown, and others. They don't have a variation of that, they have exactly that.

So how exactly does it benefit the community to have a non-niche forum pop up? Well, it doesn't. In fact, it actually just dilutes the online paintball community, and provides another website for people to get lost in, without connecting to a larger paintball populace. It also means that paintball media have to keep tabs on yet another forum if they want to stay up to date and abreast of things.

I scrapped the Grey Ops forum because it wasn't even performing or filling a duty as a niche forum (being about the goings on of Grey Ops), because there's no point in building something and maintaining it if there's no need or demand for it.

So here's my suggestion to Hustle Paintball: You guys have a good thing going, and you seem to be very successful. Why bother in the upkeep and costs behind a general interest paintball forum when you can buy or informally maintain a section on an already popular forum that suits your needs? In the end you're probably not contributing to a greater paintball online community (that's not an attack, just my opinion) and it's going to just become another point of dilution.

I have signed up for Hustle Paintball under the moniker of connor_greyops for the purpose of posting this article there.

If you're interested in looking for a paintball forum to join, I'd recommend considering the following:

PBN - The 4chan of the paintball community (frustrating for mature or milsim oriented players, and not recommended for those groups)
TechPB - The ebaumsworld  of the paintball community (always at odds with PBN, yet to the outsider appears remarkably similar)
M. Carter Brown - A generally more mature (age and attitude-wise) and pump-oriented crowd that the previous two, still with elements of a general forum (varied subject matter)
Milsim Empire - For those interested in Military Simulation
X7OG - A great resource for Tippmann users and woodsball players, a spattering of milsim and other interests as well