I would agree that taint shooting is probably uncontrolled...but then ECQC evos are often difficult to control. I've been tagged a bunch of times in uncomfortable ways. It's the nature of the experience. You don't want to hurt the person but you are also wearing a fist helmet so you may not be able to see exactly what you're doing, and you do want to tag them thoroughly enough that there's no question about what the effect would have been if you'd been doing it for real.
I got my nose broken once, sparring with somebody I like quite a bit and who, as far as I know, likes me as well. I'm sure there was no malicious intent. I once laid out a guy by throwing a relatively gentle kick as he was closing in...and cracked him in the balls with my shin, a week before his honeymoon. He wasn't upset. Combat sports are inherently dangerous. If one of you is going at 60% and the other at 90%, there's something a bit off. If you're both going hard and someone takes a nut shot, well, these things happen. I have only seen one guy at ECQC ever that I thought genuinely wanted to put a beating on someone (in this case, specifically me). Bossman saw it coming and kept us separated, luckily for me as the guy probably would have had his way with me.
I don't know what point I'm really making here, but I have almost never seen malicious intent in a Shivworks class. I have definitely seen panic and desperation and uncontrolled shooting, but that's the point. It's a training environment. If you're going to do uncontrolled shit, do it with a sim gun and learn the error of your ways. That's what I did, anyway...about 5 ECQCs ago I floated a sim gun all over the place while getting my ass handed to me. I don't think I was throwing rounds all helter skelter but I might have been; it was a long time ago and I have been hit in the head a lot. But afterwards, I was critiqued and even mid-evo I heard Craig saying "don't float the gun, you're floating the gun!" and I realized I was totally uncontrolled and I can't remember if I fixed it on the spot - probably not - but you know what I did do was fix it over time.
Evos expose your limitations. You will make mistakes and do stuff wrong and shoot people in places you will later feel sorry about. If I was going to give a single sentence of advice to people going it would be "Try your best and don't be an asshole." But there would still be taint shots, because in my experience, 99% of people doing that have no ill intent and may not know exactly where their opponent's taint is at all times during an evo. It's certainly not something on my permanent radar. I just want rounds on centre of mass, and if they reach COM via TAINT, I'll take it and buy a beer later because in the moment I want to win and I want the other guy to be facing a guy who wants to win and doesn't care about how.
I apologize for the length of this comment which is positioned as a bit of a rebuttal...it's not because I'm amped up and indignant or anything, I'm just waiting around while my wife puts the 1980s He-Man and She-Ra movie on a USB and I'm explaining myself at length because I hate being unclear. Sometimes a long reply can come across as confrontational which is not my intent, I just have a lot of thoughts about SW courses.
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Originally Posted by Gewehr3
