Fed up with Nerf "super soakers"

Discussions of all varieties of stock water guns and water blasters.
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dragonclass
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Fed up with Nerf "super soakers"

Post by dragonclass » Mon May 26, 2014 6:15 pm

:x I gave Nerf/Hasbro a broadside on their Facebook. You would think that keeping with the tradition of making the Nerf guns more powerful, sooner or later it would apply to the soakers. I gave them enough time, and they went the opposite way, so I let them know. Oops,
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Re: Fed up with Nerf "super soakers"

Post by the oncoming storm » Mon May 26, 2014 6:33 pm

As I'm sure you already knew, your post is nothing new to the online community, we just suck it up and use our 12-17 year old CPS's
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Re: Fed up with Nerf "super soakers"

Post by HBWW » Mon May 26, 2014 7:01 pm

I've tried to keep my distaste for NSS products somewhat under the radar. I linked to marauder's Barrage review a few times, and made a few posts here and there, but kept it classy. Shouldn't be a problem, I think, as things seem to have changed on that page. Now, they just seem to just ignore most posts that involve any references to CPS.
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Re: Fed up with Nerf "super soakers"

Post by marauder » Mon May 26, 2014 7:07 pm

CA99 wrote:I've tried to keep my distaste for NSS products somewhat under the radar. I linked to marauder's Barrage review a few times, and made a few posts here and there, but kept it classy. Shouldn't be a problem, I think, as things seem to have changed on that page. Now, they just seem to just ignore most posts that involve any references to CPS.
We need more reviews like this. Hopefully I can do more with time.
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Re: Fed up with Nerf "super soakers"

Post by isoaker » Mon May 26, 2014 8:10 pm

dragonclass, great to see you 'round!

Yeah, Hasbro seems to have flipped - once Super Soaker helped Nerf survive - now Nerf is dominating and they've left the "Super Soaker" brand to rot. I remain optimistic that eventually we'll see better stock water blasters, but I'm not counting on Hasbro...

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Re: Fed up with Nerf "super soakers"

Post by HBWW » Tue May 27, 2014 10:30 am

iSoaker, I'm genuinely curious as to the source of your optimism for the water blasters portion of the market.

Pull valves are dropping dead like flies, more and more are having leaks. We'll need better solutions as time goes on.
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Re: Fed up with Nerf "super soakers"

Post by isoaker » Tue May 27, 2014 3:34 pm

CA99 wrote:iSoaker, I'm genuinely curious as to the source of your optimism for the water blasters portion of the market.

Pull valves are dropping dead like flies, more and more are having leaks. We'll need better solutions as time goes on.
First, of course, we need key patents to expire. From there, I hope to see the return of some bladder-based blasters. If this can help provide more capital for blaster development, can hope for stepping up performance from there. Granted, this is probably looking ahead on at least a 5-or-so year time frame, but I'd rather think positively. The first goal would be to coax CPS1000-like performance back to an expected level for a larger water blaster, then push for more as, I believe, CPS1000-type performance would at least make more better organized games.

Once upon a time, the community was very happy with Super Soaker XP150-level of performance. A Water Warriors Colossus should be able to give a Super Soaker XP 150 a good run for its money.

For what it's worth, if we want others to get into water warfare, we should focus on what we can do and not dwell on what we're currently missing. That doesn't mean we shouldn't want more, but we should be able to still suggest fun game ideas even if a new user only has access to water blasters currently available in major retail stores.

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Re: Fed up with Nerf "super soakers"

Post by HBWW » Tue May 27, 2014 5:14 pm

Fair enough. 5 years is a long time to look forward to, let alone anticipate, and looks like things will depend mostly on the economy itself and the cost of materials. It seems that the hobby has waned in favor of Nerf though, which could explain why performance isn't making things sell like hotcakes.

CPS 1000 is indeed a good baseline performance, and with CPS, lends itself better to modding. The Gorgon is still very effective though, so I think it's more of a cost/economics issue now.

The real issue with performance however, is that without it (and without the skills to boot), it's very difficult to play at any reasonable level of competitiveness in our League events. But for starting any old water war, the XP-performing Water Warriors blasters have been around for a long time. Are we missing game promotion opportunities from there? Or is it just that people simply aren't interested?

Trying to make helpful posts, videos, materials, etc. that promote the hobby is not easy. You guys saw how long it took to get the Frozen Fury video up and running, and after the obvious, I didn't have many avenues of promoting the video. Perhaps I need to strategize how videos are posted and show up in search results. Perhaps I need to cheat a little bit, and use titles such as "Nerf Super Soaker [new blaster name] put to the test! (WWn [event name and year])", as marauder's review of the Barrage managed to make the top search result. It seems that we got to get this timed right, and we may have a chance at having one of our videos actually spread. We've already established that the videos need to be interesting and watchable, and based on everyone's responses to the Frozen Fury video that I've heard, I think I've done just that. The real test is whether this material can catch the attention of larger groups.

Or do we just keep sticking our noses in Nerf's Facebook comments? (Which, by the way, will be noticed by far more people than just simply posting to the page itself.)
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Re: Fed up with Nerf "super soakers"

Post by the oncoming storm » Tue May 27, 2014 6:06 pm

Isoaker clearly never read Marauder and DX's work at dual-fest, because the XP 150 slaughtered the Colossus 11 to 3, thanks to the 4x larger pump.
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Re: Fed up with Nerf "super soakers"

Post by HBWW » Tue May 27, 2014 6:45 pm

It's very interesting how, despite having vastly superior stats, the 150 still wins out. I wasn't there in the duelfest to see it, nor have I played games with both blasters mixed in together, but if pumping is indeed an important factor of combat practicality, the smaller CPS's should fare better against the 2000.

Maybe there's a factor of combat style that we're missing? I guess we'll have to wait for marauder and DX to comment. That said, it's been well established that going by stats alone isn't doing much on its own, which is part of why homemades aren't taking over at our wars.
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Re: Fed up with Nerf "super soakers"

Post by isoaker » Tue May 27, 2014 8:05 pm

the oncoming storm wrote:Isoaker clearly never read Marauder and DX's work at dual-fest, because the XP 150 slaughtered the Colossus 11 to 3, thanks to the 4x larger pump.
Oh, I read it. The XP150's pump definitely gives it an advantage, but while an XP150 is still an overall better blaster than a Colossus, I would still argue that a Colossus makes for a decent blaster to battle with. There are a number of things that could definitely be improved on modern water blasters. While we definitely should provide feedback on how they can be improved, we also must look for the strengths and how to get others to get the most fun from what is available. Otherwise, we will just end up killing the potential community from our own negativity.

Oh, and 5+ years is a long time frame and not necessarily one that I'd expect any current member to easily put up with. From my perspective, considering I've been running a water blaster website for ~16 years, I'd still rather think positively.

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Re: Fed up with Nerf "super soakers"

Post by the oncoming storm » Wed May 28, 2014 6:28 am

I never said the colossus was a bad gun, just that it isn't as good as the XP 150 (something you said it was). And about modern blasters I honestly want to buy some Python 2's for loaning and epic duel-wielding, I'm not all doom and gloom.
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Re: Fed up with Nerf "super soakers"

Post by isoaker » Wed May 28, 2014 7:58 am

the oncoming storm wrote:I never said the colossus was a bad gun, just that it isn't as good as the XP 150 (something you said it was).
Actually, I didn't say the Colossus was as good as the XP 150, either - I said, "A Water Warriors Colossus should be able to give a Super Soaker XP 150 a good run for its money." Put in another way, the Colossus user may still end up losing against an XP 150 user in an OHK/OHS game, but it wouldn't be a cakewalk compared to an XP 150 user going against pretty much any of the 2014 Nerf Super Soaker blasters. :goofy:

That said, while many community members like the competitive nature of OHK/OHS games, let's face it; the majority of casual water fights are soakfests. I really wish we could figure out how to easily measure how much water someone was hit with as opposed to either relying on the honor system or some limited-area tag device. To me, counting hits is fine and all, but if we could capture volume received (without using dorky vest devices that didn't look like they'd work well), that'd emphasize the "water" part of water warfare.

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