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Double checking their answers while they fill out the questionaire before you start work on their PC?

From: http://lotl.cc/humor.xs

1. Describe your problem:
2. Now, describe the problem accurately:
3. Speculate wildly about the cause of the problem:
4. Problem Severity:

      1. Minor __
      2. Minor __
      3. Minor __
      4. Trivial __

5. Nature of the problem:
      1. Locked Up __
      2. Frozen __
      3. Hung __
      4. Strange Smell __
6. Is Your Computer Plugged In? Yes_____ No______
7. Is It Turned On? Yes_____ No_____
8. Have you tried to fix it yourself? Yes_____ No_____
9. Have you made it worse? Yes_____ No_____
10. Have you had a "friend" who "Knows all about computers" try to fix it for you? Yes_____ No_____
11. Did they make it worse? Yes_____ No_____
12. Have you read the manual? Yes_____ No_____
13. Are you sure you've read the manual? Yes_____ No_____
14. Are you absolutely certain you've read the manual? Yes_____ No_____
15. If you read the manual, do you think you understood it? Yes_____ No_____
16. If 'yes', then explain why you can't fix the problem yourself?
17. What were you doing with your computer at the time the problem occurred?
18. If you answered 'nothing' then explain why you were logged in?
19. Are you sure you aren't imagining the problem? Yes_____ No_____
20. Does the clock on your home VCR blink 12:00? Yes_____ What's a VCR? _____
21. Do you have a copy of 'PCs for Dummies'? Yes_____ No_____
22. Do you have any independent witnesses to the problem? Yes_____ No_____
23. Do you have any electronics products that DO work? Yes_____ No_____
24. Is there anyone else you could blame this problem on? Yes_____ No_____
25. Have you given the machine a good whack on the top? Yes_____ No_____
26. Is the machine on fire? Yes_____ No_____ Not Yet_____
27. Can you do something else instead of bothering me? Yes_____ No_____

Playing games at a lan party isn't a public showing, unless you're providing both the games and the computers. If the participants are providing thier own machines and thier own copies of the game, then you need no such permission. If you want to play it on the safe side though, just call a few of the games' publishers and ask permission, or ask what you need to do to go about getting permission. My money's on the fact that not one of them will say 'no, you may not play our game at your lan party', and some might even provide cheap door prizes.

I've been running a LAN party with some friends for the last few years btw, so I'm not completely talking out of my ass. :)

This always, always holds true when you host such a big lan party.

...CONTINUED FROM PREVIOUS MESSAGE...

[...security blah blah]
With 120+ people, odds are there will be several "Mister Angry's", and the only reason they dont annihilate the person sitting next to them at smaller LAN parties is that almost everyone there knows who they are, and/or where they live. If they're stuck in a room full of strangers, after the 10th time they get blown away by a teammate, someone's monitor is going thru the wall. Be ready to jump on it as soon as they stand up and start yelling.

G) Make Headphones Mandatory. No exceptions. If they 'forgot' to bring theirs, they have to play with no sound. You can't have 100 people all showing off their sub-woofers the whole time, it will be mass chaos because no one will be able to hear themselves think. If you want to be helpful/entrepreneurial, buy a bunch of cheap headphones beforehand and sell them to people who dont have any. You should also bring lots of extra (long) network cables and power strips to sell/loan to the people. Without fail, at least 2 person in a 30 person LAN party will FORGET their own NIC cable or powerstrip and won't be able to play. With 120+ people, you'd have to assume at least 10 or so.

H) Post a list of games that will be played at the event, and try to loosely schedule times to announce that "everyone is playing Counter-strike now", or whatever game you kids play these days heheh. Otherwise you will have lots of little factions of people who want to play a certain game, and with 120 people you'll have 20 groups of 6 people each playing their own favorite game. Defeats the purpose of having a large lan party and everyone will feel that the event sucks because they could play with more people at home on the net. You don't have to be too strict about it, but someone who is "in charge" is going to have to be a negotiator between the main factions, and get everyone to agree to "play BF1942 for 3 hours, then we'll play Counterstrike for 3 hours", etc. With 120 people, you can increase the number of simultaneous games being played to 2 or 3 probably, and still have full servers.

Also, if you have the hardware to spare, run dedicated servers for the popular games yourselves. Otherwise, you have 5 people who all start running servers for the same game at the same time, and people get split up into little groups again, waiting around for 'everyone else to join the server'. If you can't/dont want to run the servers for all the games, have some way for everyone to easily see the IP/names of the "officially sanctioned" servers, even tho it's just some random guy's computer actually running it. Like write big on a chalkboard or use a projection screen which most conference rooms have.

I) Download the latest patches/update files for ALL the games that anyone might play during the party and set up a file server to share them. Make sure you include the address(es) to access these servers on the little sheets you hand out. Assigning everyone an IP/table and giving them a central location to get patches will cut down on HOURS of people wandering between tables asking for CDs or the folder names on each others' shared drives. Actually, you'll probably want multiple servers doing this, but make sure everyone has the addresses of them. Now that BitTorrent is available, it would probably help dramatically reduce the load on the server's hard drive, which is usually the bottleneck in these situations.

Actually now that I think about it, if you've got the time/money/CDburner, you'd probably be better off burning all those files onto a CD and handing them out to people with their sign-in sheets. (We never actually tried this.) Only problem is, even if you only stick to 4-5 games thru-out the whole weekend, one or more of them will have a new patch released between the time that you announce the event and the day it actually happens, so you'd either have to burn them all the day before, or risk having some of them obsoleted. Dunno, something to think a

Make sure you tell all the audiophiles to keep their volume down. Just to say it again, lanparty.com, and make sure everyone knows what games will be played, and what patches they'll need.

Lan of the Lost

You can bet that most of these people will be there...