Reasoning aside, why should I be a slave to what other people's desire? Part of making your own game is being able to do what you want with it, right? Should I not have the freedom to make changes I think will make the game more enjoyable?
Now that that's out of the way:
Originally in Quake and Quake2, there was a maximum entity velocity that prohibited us from having normal velocities for paintballs. In fact, the original paintballs were so slow that gravity had to be reduced for just the paintballs so they would travel any kind of distance. Even with that, you still often had to run around with your crosshair pointed at the sky in order to be able to hit anybody. Eventually, we discovered a way around the maximum velocity setting, and set the ball speed to what was calculated to be 300 feet per second (what we were informed was the typical velocity for a paintball gun).
I'm sure some of you have noticed, though, that the balls are a bit too fast. You can pick people off clear across rather sizeable maps, shoot people that are on 20-story high structures, pin down players at distant chokepoints, etc. Now that I'm getting more into real paintball, I see that real paintballs have nowhere near the range they do in the game. I thought it was because of the air friction at first, but after revisiting the code, I noticed that the steel barrel upgrade resulted in velocities exceeding 400 fps, which is quite a bit higher than the absolute maximum legal limit for paintball velocities (300 fps), and higher yet than what most fields allow (~280fps).
I realize this isn't a simulation, but based on some of the complaints about the fast ball speed and some of my own experiences in the game, I felt it would be better to tone it down some. I tweaked it just a little so it wouldn't be a drastic change that would require a lot of adjustment, and I'll probably continue to tweak it in small increments over a period of time.
Between leaving my old job, packing my stuff up and making plans to move to California, finding out I wasn't going to be moving to California after all, calling everything off, Christmas, just wanting get Build 20 released, and the server crashing exploit fiasco, I'm sorry I didn't give this the attention it deserved, because it obviously should have been one of my top priorities. Heaven forbid I touch a line of code or adjust a variable without the almighty community's approval, especially with the salary they're paying me.
Why do I waste my time explaining myself time and time again? Why do I continue to let certain individuals post on the forums when they rarely do anything but antagonize me?
