I think I just had the best weekend of airsoft I've had in literally a decade. Started with an airsoft car-boot sale, where I picked up a TM 4.3 Hicapa for £50, lots of socialising and chatting to everyone. Then we played some 5v5 and 4v4 games, because the player numbers were super low on the Saturday, which were really fun (and really challenging as a sneaky sniper, since the enemy team gets suspicious when they can't see the 4th or 5th player. It's a lot easier to keep track of things when there are only 5 enemies). Camped over night, which involved some great fireside chats with some of the other guys who were camping over, until 2:30am in the otherwise pitch black. Maybe I should've gone to bed earlier, but I have no regrets and I'd do it again.
Then had a full day of fantastic games where I managed to sneak behind the enemy team in the morning games and was picking them all off from behind, finding out my friend was pretty much parallel to me on the other side of the area, shooting them from the front and this getting us some rather colourful, frustrated cries about how snipers are unfair. However, after lunch I was removed from my team and put in a small 6 person group of 2 scientists and 4 guards where the objective for both teams was to retrieve the scientists' briefcases and we were told by the marshalls to "make them work for it"...
3 hours into holding them all off and only 10 minutes remaining for the day, we decided to give a suitcase to each team so that there could actually be a winner to the games. Working as a cohesive unit is the real overpowered way of playing airsoft, as we simply set ourselves up in concealed positions (most of us were experienced sneaky-beakies and/or bush wookiees) with overlapping fields of fire, moving when we had to but always keeping each other's positions in mind when we did. I lost track of how many people I hit, but it was a LOT. Outnumbered, outgunned, but not outdone!
So what did I learn? Apart from the normal reinforcement of "you can stealth in short sleeves and a cheap £25 leafy hood thing from Russia", I learned that my new HPA m21 setup is bonkers. Easily accurate to 60m and still pretty accurate to 65m on 1.1J, so no MED and full auto if I really want, though I did change my full auto to 3 round burst. It's also incredibly quiet, not quite as quiet as my VSR, but I think it's quieter than my mk23. It has definitely cemented itself in as my primary gun for the late spring through autumn while the site is pretty overgrown. We'll see if it can dethrone the VSR in the winter through early spring when the sight lines are longer, but it's so liberating being able to shoot people within 30m and having semi-auto ROF instead of bolt action, but also retaining that long range option.
I'm going to have tree-trunk arms by next summer if I use this gun on the regular now. It weighs an absolute tonne compared to the VSR!