Black Ops Airsoft — Local services in Bristol

After watching some great gameplay from previous years, I drove a bit over 5 hours for OP Freedom 8 at Black Ops. Really wanted to like this field but found organization and planning exceedingly lacking. There were two registration stations to handle 500+ people and all retail sales, which led to this line taking about 50 minutes. Chrono took another 45 minutes waiting for the 2 slow moving stations to process everyone. Safety briefing glossed over a number of important rules (medic/revive rules, radio channels, etc.), with the owner instead spending most of it going on a diatribe about cheating. There was no effort to organize players into squads or otherwise coordinate team strategy.

The start of the game felt quite ad hoc, with some fireworks and someone at the FOB saying 'yeah, I guess it started' being the only real indicator gameplay was active. With the weekend tipping into the upper 90s with high humidity, no effort was made to adjust the FOBs locations to be closer to staging/parking, resulting in a ton of players falling out almost immediately and relegating most all of the day's action to the forested area near the FOB. Team objectives were occasionally passed along via word of mouth at the FOB, with everything else just being an overly hot force on force game.

Overall, very disappointing. The city structures here are super cool and are frankly the only reason I gave this review 2 stars. The field did a great job designing the city, but they need to spend some time getting organized and rethinking gameplay to actually make use of these best parts of the field.

Edit: In light of the owner's response, I edited this to 1 star. If having 200 people check in on Saturday was a normal day for them, they really need to revise things, as an hour and a half for check-in and chrono is wild. As for rules, I can read and was familiar with these things. Most professional fields take the time to touch on rules during safety briefings instead of going on long rants about how you reward your staff for catching cheaters. As touched on before, no information on radio channels was mentioned during the briefing or in the players packet, and no effort was made to assemble folks into squads as was detailed in the players packet. If you truly "told everyone what to do" in the players packet, you need to spend some time revising future packets to include this information.

As for playing in the woods vs. city, I guess props if you actually intended for this to be beneficial. It was significantly more humid and stagnant in the woods, so I really don't understand this decision.

Lastly, you mention "as an event host I cannot predict rain or heat". This is true, but what you can do is adjust the game in light of weather conditions. Push to a later weekend, start gameplay earlier, set up cooling stations at FOBs or staging, or move the FOBs. If "everyone all weekend was telling you how great of a job you were doing", folks either weren't telling you the truth or you weren't listening. People were streaming off the field almost immediately after game start, and I spoke with a good number of folks on both sides who were confused why the game seemed so...

Been playing here for about 3yrs, on Sunday’s. I own a lifetime membership card. They’re a good field. Game modes are fun, usually. Sometimes they get uncreative and have us basically play TDM for hours, but that is the exception instead of the rule.

My only problem would be the REF staff. It’s a coin toss if they’ll be hot headed ego heads, or lazy and uncaring. Or be extremely motivated and looking to create a good time for the players.

I personally have only had one BAD BAD experience with the ref’s, and it was over a rule misunderstanding. They introduced vehicles again after years of no use! I had played there for a whole year and never saw them in use! So, when a teammate of mine grenade the vehicle and I saw the driver (a ref) pull out a red flag. This declares THE WHOLE VEHICLE DEAD. I thought it just meant the driver was. So I see his passenger, with his pistol still pointed out the window (turns out it was stuck in the mesh), aiming at my teammates. So I run up,aim thru the driver window and shoot him twice. Ref sees me shoot what he knows is a dead guy… I saw a guy aiming at my team. He explains that it is stuck in the window. How tf am I supposed to know? Now, he dealt with it well. I made an error, and was rightly punished for it. I wouldn’t get to finish that match. He explains to the head referee what happened, and he wants to perma ban me over it…. By some grace of god, the other ref’s there said that was a bad call and that I had just started to be a regular. So they didn’t ban me. Only thing that worries me is if I hadn’t been going there as often as I had, I would’ve been screwed?! Someone even newer to the field, and way less experienced with the field, would have been more heavily punished. Regardless, my one match ban, that almost became a permanent ban, got upgraded (or downgraded) to a day ban.

Part that blows, is that was my brother’s last weekend before going back to college. Kind of ruined that day. While I would usually play without him during the late summer, and early fall season, I didn’t start going to that field again till the next year.

All grievances aside, the adult staff are great. The owner, is amazing and based. He does not take s* from anyone. You could be a yearly big ticket customer, and you want to fight him over you cheating? You’re gone! He is not afraid to be on the front line with his ref’s. His customers love him, and for good reason. He’s a good man and wish him and his business the best.

I’m sure in a few years this annoyance of mine will pass, and this will turn into a 5 star. Meanwhile, with the young, mixed bag staff on Sunday’s leave me with anxiety every time I go. Because you may just get canned over a...

The first thing I want to say is I have no clue why so many people are hating on the owner. He is probably the most useful and knowledgeable person at the field. The next thing I want to say is of the hundreds of people playing at the field each day, a chunk of players are rentals or newcomers who have started to play the sport and believe me when I say the referees make sure all of them know what they're doing and keep everyone safe by following the rules and by explaining anything that comes up. Now, font get me wrong, I've had a few bad experiences with players who really shouldn't be part of the sport, but that's maybe one time every other month I go. (I just started going to this field again after being sick for a while.) Now for actually good and bad things:

Good: The owner is amazing and helps everyone while also keeping the field running and safe

Referees explain the rules and give announcements on when the next game will be, and if it's the last game, they also say that.

The field is 100 acres large (probably more because, like I said, I have not been here in a while)

Open play has over 3 hours of playing (first game usually at 10 am and the last game around 5 pm for specific days, of course)

Although the store doesn't buy your gear/loadouts, many MANY players will be down to trade or buy your stuff from you for decent prices. (This also goes for buying stuff from players.)

The field has a tech shop, a heated briefing/prep area, two different spots for food within a 2 minute walk, and many other things you can do such as axe throwing, pool and more. (The axe throwing and stuff can be found in D's barn, which is technically part of the field, but yk.)

Oh, and since I forgot to say, the rules are easy to learn, and getting your guns chronographed is quite simple (even if lines are sometimes long.

Lots of newcommers and existing players are part of the massive community.

Now for the Bad things:

As stated above, some players don't belong in the sport, but that really goes for every sport/hobby.

That's pretty much it. The only thing I would want from this field is maybe more diverse gamemodes because some days, you do sometimes see a repeat of gamemodes. Other than that, I think this field is really great and deserves much more love than it has received from the people who have caused problems or cheat all of the time (before they get banned.)who knows, in the future the field may need more land for parking and playing from how many people showed up. Especially for the events that have been held.

Edit: The prep/briefing area is called the staging area. That was my fault for...