Rifling in paintball was always questionable. You had people who swore by it, and people like myself who knew better lol. Companies came out with "straight" rifling. Which were basically channels in the barrels designed to create an even airflow runway around the ball. You know, marketing and hype. Hammerhead is more or less the only big company left that does and swears rifling works. The problem is for it to even have ANY affect on the ball, you need paint of a very specific size. So its kind of largely useless.
When first strikes first came out, people were pretty skeptical. "Sniper" rounds had been attempted before. Football shaped paintballs, plastic fins (like the back of a nerf football) that you glued to your paint. They came and went because they didn't work or weren't practical. First Strikes came out in 08 and are now largely accepted at fields all over (though it was an uphill battle). There are very few fields that don't allow them, and even those are now coming around. They're here to stay, they work. With a max travel distance of 177 yards and a max effective useful accurate range of 150 yards, they definitely work (all at 300fps of course).
They weren't designed for rifled barrels though. Thats why they have fins, they spin themselves. Some people decided to try it anyway. Turns out it increases their performance in every way by quite a lot. This is well documented and factual at this point. You can see it in the videos I posted Rifled barrels are now standard for first strike.
As far as night games go. Yeah we have 3 day events that last all weekend and often ONE of those nights are a designated play time. I don't know how many people are utilizing the expensive military grade stuff. But night vision is most definitely used. Funny enough, a lot of people take that CoD special edition NVG and mod that to work with their goggles. I personally don't do night games, no NVG type set up lol. So I can't offer too much commentary on it. Except Ive seen pictures of expensive set ups from games in the past. I think scopes on the markers are a bit more popular the helmet mounts and what not.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qn8l...ature=youtu.be
And as far as winter goes, ALL THE TIME. I LOVE snow games.