So guys we all know that currently forums are not in vogue I think there are allot of reasons they should be myself. But this is a weird topic but I think it has merit. What I want to know is why you came to MIA, what drew you here functionally or feature wise. I'll post below to give my own example, but I think knowing what drove you here initially may yield some interesting things that may tell us something about going forward as a community.
So I came to MIA because I was at the time wanting to get into paintball. I couldn't find a gun or guns that I really liked. I had played paintball in the past non-seriously and was looking to take it up a notch. But as I researched I just didn't like the guns. Then I got into the cost, at the time I was a young guy without much extra income, the cost of CO2 and paint was just a bit investment for the amount I wanted to play which was all the time. So somehow in my searching(I say searching because crazily enough I don't think I was using google yet), I came across airsoft, and started just digging into it deeply to learn about it. The guns drew me in, I've been a gun guy my whole life and I loved the idea of realistic guns and particularly guns I couldn't easily own like full auto's and weird guns like the P90 etc. I'd owned and shot allot of typical centerfire rifles like AR's, and AK's but they were semi of course. So the idea of these cool guns was a draw, and the cost wasn't that much when compared to the real deal. I mean I TM P90 used would be a couple hundred dollars, a PS90 which didn't exist to my knowledge at the time was around a thousand if not more.
So in searching I learned a bunch, joined forums because that's where I found myself searching for information. I may have even joined Airsoft Players or one of the other larger forums at the time before MIA. Then stumbled into MIA and found a community. The players and the scene as a whole was quite a bit smaller than anytime since then, from memory MIA had a couple hundred players when I started on the forums. But they were a tight community of guys traveling around the state on the weekends to play games on someone's property. There was one Michigan retailed, Wolverine Tactical long gone now. But at the time the guy who ran it was named Mike, and I actually bought some stuff from him at my first game downstate. But overall it was a good group of guys who loved playing airsoft. Sure there was drama but generally not from the admin/mod side of things, they seemed to just like playing and trying to further the sport as a whole.
And when you asked a question, pending it wasn't a stupid question or in the wrong area etc. You got an answer, and while there might be discussion about minutia you could find someone who knew the answer. Come to find out many years later guys weren't always right but they were right for the time. For instance gearbox timing, at the time somehow that made sense, it was the excuse honestly we used to explain midfeeds in gearboxes likely related to either hopup, nozzle, or other issues we'd not figured out at the time. And you have to realize this was before youtube, I Learned to take apart a gearbox from a series of photos/text from Airsoft Players forum, and then jumped in.
But overall for me it was the game, love for it and the community that came up around it with a good dose of knowledge from guys who'd been taking apart their own guns. Typically at the time fixing guns rather than tuning, tuning tended to be more common later. At the time shooting 400fps on a stock TM without it eating itself was pretty much everyone's goal. RPS wasn't on anyone's radar that I'm aware of, at least not at that point.
So I'm curious for you guys what drew you in, feel free to repeat even if someone else already posted I'm interested to hear.
Take care!
Luke
