Paintball

Loot a gun from a chest, hold your health bar, and shoot everyone else - free-for-all, teams, or capture the flag.

Epilepsy warning. Some items in this game create bright flashes and rapid flashing effects on screen. If you are sensitive to flashing lights, please be aware before you play.

Overview

Paintball is a pure arena shooter bolted onto the shard. Your normal character, skills and equipment do not matter here - everyone drops in on an even footing with 100 health, scrounges weapons out of chests, and fights until the timer runs out. It is fast, loud, and has nothing to do with your build.

Because it is instanced and self-contained, you never risk a thing. Your backpack, your worn gear and even your mount are stashed the moment you enter, and all of it comes back when the match ends. Win or lose, you walk out with exactly what you walked in with.

Game Modes

Three modes are in the rotation. The signup stone is set to one mode at a time, so which one you get depends on the slot you sign up for.

• Free For All - every player for themselves, no teams. Most kills wins, and this is the mode the shrinking storm runs in.
• Team Deathmatch - two squads face off in rounds. You are tinted your team's colour so friend and foe are obvious: the Splatz against the Dripz. A round ends when one team is wiped out, the team with the most rounds wins, and a lopsided 7-0 lead ends the match early.
• Capture the Flag - the same two teams, but now you are grabbing the enemy flag and hauling it home. It runs the full clock with the same big-lead mercy rule, so pushing a lead still matters.

Joining a Match

Paintball runs on the same cadence as Defense of the Shards, offset from it: a Paintball event fires 2 hours after each DotS event, so across the day one of the two events is firing every 2 hours. The signup stone lights up in the window before each Paintball slot - double-click it while it is lit to add your name, and click it again to drop out. Check the stone for the next slot.

Switch to the Paintball profile. A Paintball Razor profile is on the way; when it ships, load it as you enter the event so your weapon and item macros are set up before the first shot.

When the window closes the event launches on its own. You are sent to a waiting area, then split into a match instance - a big turnout is divided across arenas so nobody is fighting a crowd of two dozen at once. Your real gear is moved into a secure stash that survives even a crash or a relog, and you arrive in the arena in a team uniform with a starter kit: a pistol, a knife and a pack of ammo. Everything you own is handed back the moment you are teleported out.

An event needs a minimum turnout to fire or it is cancelled and everyone is released. The exact minimum is tuned on the server and currently sits low for testing, so check the stone for the live count.

Health & Combat

Every player has a flat 100 HP. Weapons chip that down by fixed amounts, and when you hit zero you are splatted - out for the round in Team Deathmatch, or straight back to a respawn in the other modes. There is no armor rating, no resist and no dodge from your skills, only the health bar and whatever gear you are carrying.

Firing is built for the arena, not for UO's usual targeting. Most weapons shoot in the direction you are facing - no target cursor - so aiming is about positioning and where you point your body. Trigger a shot with the [Shoot command or by double-clicking the equipped weapon; only the long-range Mortar, the thrown Grenade and Flashbang, and the Air Strike ask you to pick a tile. Weapons are two-handed and mutually exclusive, so switching guns means swapping the one in your hands.

When you die there is no corpse. Everything you were carrying spills onto the ground in a pile for anyone to grab, so a good kill re-arms the killer. Some arenas are also seeded with hazards - lightning, meteor and acid - that deal 33 damage a hit with a visual cue and no warning text, plus destructible cover that only the explosive weapons can blow apart.

Weapons

You start with only the pistol and knife - everything else you loot. Each gun fires one fixed kind of shot with its own damage, range and cooldown; there is no ammo-type selection. Guns auto-reload from ammo packs in your pack when a magazine runs dry.

Breaking cover. RPG, Mortar, Grenade and Air Strike are the tools that blow apart destructible cover; every other weapon leaves it standing.

Chests & Power-ups

The chests scattered through each arena are your armory. Loot one and it hands out a mix of a weapon, ammo and an item, depending on the chest. A looted chest turns red and refills after two and a half minutes, so the good spots are worth fighting over again and again.

The Storm

The Free For All mode has a battle-royale twist. A safe circle sits over the arena and, about five minutes in, begins to shrink. Step outside it and you take a steady 10 damage a second - it ignores your Kevlar and pushes you toward the middle whether you like it or not. The whole ground outside the ring glows red so there is never any doubt about where the danger is, with a ring of smoke marking the edge.

The zone starts wide, closes faster as the match goes on, and tightens down to a small central circle in the final stretch, leaving nowhere to hide and forcing the survivors into one last brawl in the middle. Keep moving, keep an eye on the red, and do not get greedy looting when the wall is coming in.

Rewards

Playing paintball earns Paintball Points, a currency tied to your account and paid out at the end of a match by how you placed - the top finishers in a free-for-all, and the winning team plus its MVP in the team modes. You spend the points at a paintball reward vendor on dyed cloth and dyes in a set of bright highlighter colours for your gear, hair, spell effects and furniture.

Tips

• Loot a chest before you pick a fight. The pistol and knife will not carry you far - arm up first.
• Learn the chest spots. They refill every two and a half minutes, so holding the good ones is holding the match.
• Save the Medpack for when you are actually low, not the first scratch.
• Kills re-arm you: whoever you drop leaves their whole loadout on the ground.
• In a free-for-all, treat the shrinking circle as the real enemy. Rotate to the middle early and let the greedy cook in the red.
• Nothing you own is on the line - your gear is stashed and returned - so play aggressive.