Action Airgun Premier Season

The premier season of Action Airgun has wrapped up as of yesterday, and I wanted to give some final thoughts on the game, and where I hope and think it's headed in the future. I had a lot of a fun shooting this game, and even managed to come out as the champion of the Premier season. I finished with a quite comfortable lead over 2nd place, who seemed to stop shooting the courses of fire after about 6 weeks; which actually was a problem across the board. Before I get to that, let me talk a little about what made this fun, and what gives it the potential to succeed.

One of the things I really liked about Action Airgun was the ease of access - all you have to do to play is go to their website (www.actionairgun.com) order the kit and sign up for the season (which would now be Action Airgun Season 1) and you're ready to play. The courses of fire were fun without being frustrating, and were so accessible that Mrs. Ahab was able to shoot some good times on many of them. The kit contains everything you need to shoot, from a holster to a shot timer and even safety glasses. I did use up the included CO2 cartridges very fast, because I like to shoot a lot, and burned through 1500 BBs during the course of the season. Luckily for my shooting habits, CO2 cartridges are a lot cheaper than say, real ammo, so I was able to buy them in bulk and keep shooting.

The courses of fire were also a big bright spot for me. As I mentioned above, they were fun and challenging without being frustrating; and there were lots of courses of fire that played to my favorite method of shooting, i.e. as fast as possible. The week that stands out the most was week 3, where all three courses of fire were speed courses - one or two targets engaged as fast as possible. Great course of fire, and easily my favorite week of the season.

Speaking of weeks of the season, that leads me to my major bone of contention with Action Airgun, and the one thing that I feel like stands in the way of them being a really successful shooting sport. Primarily, it's the length of the season. The "Premier" Season was 12 weeks long; that meant shooting three courses of fire every week for 12 weeks, and I honestly ended up missing some courses of fire (although not many) as a result. If you look at the scores, a lot of people just stopped shooting after a while - they started strong and then just stopped caring about it, and that hurt the competition. While I believe the format of 12 straight weeks of competition has been continued for Season 1, for Season 2 I hope it changes. Honestly, at the end, it had become almost a chore for me to saddle up and shoot the courses. Based on the amount of people that didn't shoot all the courses, I'd imagine I'm not the only one. If it were my league (and it's not), I'd change it to one or two stages per month. If I did 1 stage, I would have it be 5 courses of fire, if I did 2 stages per month I'd have one stage be two long courses of fire, and the other stage would be 3 courses of fire. Either of those would give the shooter more time to shoot the COF, and would hopefully prevent the amount of burnout that happened with the Premier Season.

However, the end result was that I had a lot of fun shooting Action Airgun. And since I'm the defending champion, I'll probably be back for Season 1 to defend my title - if you want to take a run at it, head over to www.actionairgun.com and register for the next season!