I love laser tag. It's one of my favorite pastimes. Yeah, paintball is fun too, but with laser tag you don't have to buy any expensive equipment, and you don't typically walk away with welts. Everyone is on an even playing field with laser tag. With paintball, you are most likely going to be slaughtered with your cheesy rental handgun against the guy owning the custom $3000 paintball sniper rifle. With laser tag, everyone has the same equipment. Sure, you have the sucky players who say their gun wasn't working properly, their laser was misaligned, their hits weren't registering, blah blah blah, which is only very rarely true, but all in all everyone's equipment is identical. The one great fault of laser tag, however, is the unfortunate ease with which players can cheat. In paintball, there's no denying the glob of paint smacked over your face. You're hit. You're out. In laser tag, players have come up with a number of ingenious and frustrating tactics to cover their targets and thwart opposing players trying to shoot them. I spent a night out playing laser tag over the weekend, and got four rounds in. The first three rounds, I placed a solid first. (NOTE: This is largely due to the fact that the arena I frequent has recently cleared out half of it's arcade and turned it into a small concert venue for local bands, which has become a hub for the 14-17 year old crowd that can't go to real concerts, and has generated a rather congested, noisy environment swarming with annoying adolescents. This has apparently frightened off the majority of the geeky laser tag arena's members, whose only social interaction previously consisted of taking several hours away from playing Counterstrike in the depths of their Mom's basement to shoot people only somewhat more realistically with lasers in a large dark room. These geeks often referred to this practice as "exercise". Without the fanatic geek members present though, there's nothing in the way between me and first place.) However, with the fourth and final round, a large party of high school aged guys showed up to join the fray. I managed to eek out a second place finish, several thousand points behind first and a mere 30 points above third. This had nothing to do with superior skill. Only less respect for the rules. I have never been in a single game with more rampant cheating in my life, and am surprised I finished as well as I did. It was absolutely the most frustrating game I have ever played. After the night was finished though, I got to thinking of ways to thwart these cheaters without sinking to their level. I believe the game should be played with honor and respect for the rules, regardless of the other players' actions. Yet at the same time, these delinquents need to be brought to justice. So here are some of the solutions I have come up with.
Runners. In every laser tag arena I've ever been in, running has been against the rules. In a poorly lit maze, running around at high speed is a surefire way to smack into objects or other players, injuring yourself and those around you. Many cheaters do not heed this warning. So obviously the easiest way to take care of a runner is to trip them to remind them why this rule exists in the first place. If you're lucky, they may sprain something on their way down, or even knock themselves out, and the cheater will be removed from the remainder of the round and possibly the rest of the night as well. However, direct physical contact with other players is generally also against the rules, so in light of this technicality a tripwire is better employed. If you didn't happen to bring a length of rope with you, try unplugging your gun from your vest and use the cord across a hallway to fit this purpose.
Duckers. Also typically against laser tag rules is ducking or crawling on the ground. Out of all the types of cheating, I have the least problems with this one. After all, what's wrong with a 7 foot tall guy crouching and presenting the same target as one of the 3 foot ankle biters running around the arena? The only reason this rule is really in place is to prevent people from being shot in the eye with a laser, which in actuality isn't really a concern anyways, since the lasers are too low level to cause any damage to begin with. For this reason I often don't bother with duckers, and on rare occasion will violate this rule myself. However if some ducker is pissing you off by holing up in a corner and blindly shooting over a wall or something dumb like that, simply remind him of why ducking is against the rules. You could try shooting him repeatedly in the face, but it is far more effective to bring a laser pen with you and fire a constant beam into his retina while he's crouching there like the little cheater he is. He will be too distracted to continue his firing over the wall, and will likely get pissed at you in short order and come charging after you, at which point you have successfully flushed him out.
Cloakers. These are the punks who bring an extra shirt and cover their vest targets, or hole up in a corner and remove their vest entirely, letting it sit on the floor while they shoot freely over a wall. This is by far the most despicable form of cheating known to laser tag, and is what cost me my first place finish in that fourth game. The way to combat this is fairly difficult, and you have to be fairly proficient at disconnecting network cables to pull it off effectively. Most laser tag arenas make the guns easy to disconnect from the vests in order to facilitate easy swapping of broken units. The guns break far more often than the vests, so it makes more sense to just swap out the damaged part rather than replace the whole unit. This is typically done using an RJ45 connection, like your standard network cable. This connection allows you to deny these cheaters the ability to shoot others the same as they are denying others the ability to shoot them, by running up and disconnecting their guns. To be really effective though, you have to either swipe the gun entirely, or get both ends of the cable, so he's either left with no gun, or no cable to connect his gun. If you leave him with the gun and cable, he can always reconnect it, and you will have only slowed him down by about 15 seconds. It's even easier to nail the cheaters that remove their packs entirely. Again, disconnect their cable, but instead of trying to rob them of their cable or their gun, just take their whole pack, since it's just lying there on the floor. You can then dump it somewhere else in the arena, or if you want to really get them and don't have any qualms about cheating a little bit yourself to do so, toss their vest on top of yours and use it as a shield. Now you can still shoot people with your gun, but anyone shooting you will now be shooting the cheater's vest instead. Be sure to shoot the cheater's vest yourself as often as possible as well.
These are really the main forms of cheating I encounter. If you attend an arena with one handed guns you will also undoubtedly run into the "grab-and-shooters", who will grab your gun with one hand and point it away, while they shoot you in the chest with the other. I got tired of that trick. For that reason I only frequent arenas that require both hands on the gun to fire, via a heat sensor on the barrel. And camping, while cheap, is still perfectly legal. The only way to prevent players from holing up in certain spots in the arena is for the arena's layout to not provide any good spots to do so, which is virtually impossible to do. At any rate, if the arena you attend seems to turn a blind eye to these cheaters, take matters into your own hands and change the cheater into the victim.