R.I.F.T. News

Hey everyone!

Some of you might have noticed that we have not opened booking for the Village as planned for the 16th of May.
The reason for this is that Rift Airsoft will no longer be running Games at Apocalypse Paintball known by us as "The Village" from this moment onwards.

The decision to stop running Events was not an easy one to make as The Village is a VERY popular Site for Rift Airsoft and generally Fully Books every two weeks.
The Village is also not too far from Stevenage - the home of R.I.F.T. HQ and OnlyAirsoft (located in Stevenage Town Center) & it was nice to have a popular Site so near to home!
As you can imagine that the reasons for stopping were not taken lightly.

Without going into ALL the details and personal opinion I do think I owe it to our Loyal Community to touch on the reasons why we have decided to stop running Events there:

1.) The Site is enforcing "biodegradable bb's only"
2.) They are now running organised Airsoft Games themselves on days we are not there.

Before I comment, may I make this known that I fully respect and support the owners at Apocalypse Paintball as I believe they are doing what is right for their Site. Unfortunately, this goes outside our original Terms when we were given the privilege to run Events there several years ago.

Care for the Environment is more important now than ever and I do believe that using Biodegradable Ammunition IS the responsible thing to do from a certain point of view. Having said that, the only experience I have had using Bio's was not good at all. Bio's are more expensive and asking our customers to ONLY use Bio's is something we would find hard to enforce and would no doubt impact player numbers.

Every Game area we rent has the "exclusivity" clause: Rift is the only Airsoft Company to run organised Events on the Land. This clause keeps things in perspective and saves confusion and conflict of interest. It also enhances the reputation and hard work to build up a Loyal and Supportive Playerbase.

The loss of this exclusivity and sharing the Site with another Airsoft Group is something that R.I.F.T. is not willing to do.

Fear not, we are now very much on the look-out for a NEW Site in the Local area & will work hard to get an amazing venue up and running ASAP!

If you recently joined R.I.F.T. for the sole purpose of playing the Village & working on your UKARA Games, please ping me an email: tony@riftaisoft.com.

We still have FOUR other amazing Sites: Coms Site 3, REDCON-2, The Bomb Dump & The RIDGE!
VERY soon we will be running a NEW area (we currently call REDCON-2.1) at Abingdon! More news on that very soon.

In the mean time I would like to thank the guys at Apocalypse for their friendship and support over the Years and a HUGE thank you to the Loyal Rift Players who book in and play!

This is Sad news but unfortunately R.I.F.T. has no control over the decisions made at Apocalypse.

Best wishes everyone. Tony ~ R.I.F.T. HQ.

PHOTOs are UP!