PlayAirsoft Platform Update - Spring 2024

A new home for Airsoft players

After several months of blood, sweat and tears, we’ve finally done it. I’m super excited to be launching today a bespoke platform, designed from the ground up to support our mission: bringing players to the game.

Humble beginnings

PlayAirsoft started out of a passion project of two guys, after seeing and hearing players being dissatisfied with existing ways of finding reliable information about places to play airsoft. Since we too have been affected by this lack of solid intel, we decided to search the vast reaches of the Web and compile information in a handy database. Once done, we built a simple website around it, deployed it and went on with our lives.

Fast-forward a few months, and the project has blown up, exceeding all of our expectations, validating the idea of it being a useful tool to the airsoft community. Here’s where we realised there’s more to it, and a simple website and map of locations won’t cut it.

PlayAirsoft 2.0

While the first iteration of our website was a bit chaotic in places, glued from several pieces of string using a now outdated software, it did its job. Sadly, the community needs have outgrown the capabilities of our previous platform, and so we needed to develop a more robust way to serve content that we could keep extending for the foreseeable future.

Today marks an important milestone; while there’s currently no major changes to the functionality, outside and inside things have changed completely. Let’s go through some of the changes you may stumble upon.

Database status

You may have noticed that the number of locations on the current website have shrunk a bit. This is because we’ve decided to remove all places that were closed at the time of database transfer, since a large proportion of you thought they do not add any value and in some case can be misleading. This is an ongoing effort to ensure information you get is up-to-date and accurate.

Search and filtering

While the previous website had already location search and filtering, we’ve created a more accurate filtering system that uses live data and we’ll keep expanding available filtering attributes over time to bring you more options. For now you can browse through all open locations like you did before.

Improved map view

Our map has been a useful addition, but it always felt like a chore to find locations nearby. I’m happy to say that we’ve added “find my location” feature, which asks your browser for your location and re-centres the map automatically for you, so you could see what’s available around.

Suggest location

In the past, you had to go to another website to suggest a new location. As of now, this is no longer required, as we’ve built a special page, just for this purpose, with a much clearer form and submission flow. Know of a location that isn't listed yet: submit it today.

What’s next?

While this launch marks the next stepping stone in our journey, we don’t plan to sit still. Our next step is to build an authentication and account system, so we could start delivering more personal features, such as ratings and reviews of locations, which is something our community asks us often about.

We hope you will enjoy this new incarnation of PlayAirsoft. Our thanks go to everyone in the community for helping us get this far, you rock!

—PlayAirsoft Team

For now, if you have any issues, feel free to message us on our Telegram group, or send us an email to hi@playairsoft.uk.