As someone who also played competitively, I can agree it was the money that drove everyone from the game. Unlike all my other hobbies growing up that I grew out of, this became a financial choice without question. Ordering a palette of paint because our local practice field would let us bring 1-1 was a common occurrence.
God, I forgot about buying palettes. Later on when I started playing Xball it got scary how fast a team could go through one.
How much is paint these days?...i played in 2004, 2005 and I remember paying around $80 for a case (2000 rounds if i remember correctly).
Still about the same $40-$80 for 2000. When we would order palettes, 2001-2006, we would do it because it would bring our cost down to about $20/case. It was all practice paint so it had some obvious defects and wasn't anything we could use in tournaments.
Why don't they limit the rate of fire of guns in games to limit the financial ruin?
They started to, eventually. I think there's a 10 balls per second cap at the lower divisions of one of the bigger US leagues. But in most of the leagues I was in, there were no ramping modes - you'd just shoot as fast as you could, which was rarely more than 12bps.
Any rate of fire lower than that and it changes the game pretty dramatically.
In 2007 we were playing division 1 in a league with Impact - they'd later become a pro XBall team - and the first 7-man tournament in that division, we spent $750 per person for paint and entry for the weekend tournament. We shot more than 30 cases (that's 60,000 paintballs). We squeaked by into semis, and then got annihilated.
It made me realize that (a) being competitive at the highest levels of a sport requires incredible dedication on the part of everyone on a team, and (b) nobody would start playing paintball if they knew the endpoint of it was to drop a grand on a single weekend of play.
The dynamics of play got especially rough for new entrants - if you didn't have the gear that let you shoot fast enough and accurately enough to put in someone who was posted on you, you'd get stuck and frustrated. The more paint in the air, the fewer strategic options you had (other than putting more paint in the air), and the more prohibitively expensive the sport got.
I still love the sport but it set itself up to die the moment there was a recession, which, of course, came in 2008.