Hey, thanks for all of your input! Let me respond to each of the points...
- The menu background as mentioned in another thread can be a real FPS killer. Looks awesome but it'd be nice to have some simpler options.
Yeah -- it can be a problem on some systems. I actually have a different menu for the next version. You can remove the animated menu by deleting pball/scripts/console.txt in the meantime. Eventually I'll add support for selecting different menu backgrounds.
- The menu graphics don't scale up as you scale your res up, so at 1280x1024 I practically have my head pressed against the glass. 
Please make them scale upwards so they always take up the same amount of screen.
The scaling is kind of weird right now due to the way the Quake2 engine is set up. You can change the scale of everything under the layout menu or you can go to the console and type: cl_hudscale 4. You can set it to any whole value -- just find one that works well for you. At some point I'll rewrite how this works (keep in mind it's only "alpha" -- not 100% don yet).
- The cursor (practically) has to be right near the center of the menu selection past the main menu making it hard to move through the menu's (which are already lagged by the very awesome looking background ). It should be much easier to make the cursor register on a selection.
I'm not familiar with that problem - perhaps it's just a side effect of the lag due to the background. Try deleting console.txt and see if you still have the same problem.
- Users generally want to jump right in and see how all the cool stuff works right after they donwload it. For this reason there should be an intro map where a single player can go in and play with all the different weapons and get a feel for how everything works. If there is a way to do this on a regular level there needs to be some documentation on this. Just jumping onto a server without ever having picked up an item is kind of brutal.
Yeah, that's certainly something I plan to have for the final version. Perhaps even some sort of test you have to pass before you can even play online. What you can do, though, is add (very stupid) bots to maps using "sv addbot" -- you can take them out by using "sv removebot <botname/all>" I haven't had time to document everything so you kinda have to pick up stuff from the news updates and/or the "what's new" sections of the readme files.
- There's no other way to say this so I'll just say it: there are many incredibly dumb and annoying sound effects included. The sound bites from movies and TV shows really detract from the game making it feel more like something half-assed thrown together which this project clearly is not. That stuff went out of style in 97 when Doom was the big online game.
haha, well, some people love them and some people hate them. I suppose we should include a couple different sound packs to let people choose from.
- Hand grenades? Urgh. Not cool. Not paintball. Why not just add in landmines and a rocket launcher then?
http://tippmann.com/accessories/grenades/default.asp It was actually a paintball player who suggested we add them. They're quite useful from a gameplay perspective.
- Team colors: I was just on a server and it was blue versus purple, that's just dumb. Why not light-blue versus a-slightly-less-light-blue or pink versus light-red? That kind of thing also makes serious gamers run from this game.
There are 4 colors: red, blue, purple, and yellow. Maps can have up to 4 teams. That's about as distict as we could make the colors without using things like green which would blend in with the map (grass) and give that team an unfair advantage.
At least it's not like counter-strike where everybody's grey!
- Air: When going from the PGP to a semi-auto I still only got 10 shots before I had to change the air. That's not right. I remember using 12gram powerlets on PMI-3's way back in the old days but this is 2004. :-)
You should be able to shoot more than 10 times with a 12g, but it's best to just grab a bigger canister if you can.
As you've probably gathered already, it's not designed to be a realistic paintball simulation. It's designed to be fun. We might add a realism mode, but from my experience playing realistic paintball computer games/mods... it's just not very fun.
