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Multi-Million Dollar LAN Event In Germany
lmake writes: "I'm sure a few Slashdot readers have been to a few LAN events. Packed up their computer, hauled it down to the event, almost breaking their back carrying their 19" monitor just so they can play quake against 200 other people for the day. Well, those days may be over. Electronic Arts Germany is sponsoring a LAN event in Germany with a budget of 4 million DM (AUD $ 5,200,000). You won't need to bring your computer to this event, they will be provided.
View the original article (in German) here
Or Cyberforces Gaming Nation has a translation here." The translated page is also abbreviated quite a bit; the original version raises the interesting question of just who is going to pay for the 3,000 (!) PCs needed for the event. (Do you really need a PC for each player?)
I think the whole point of going to a lan-party is to be able to bring your own computer. I doesn't feel right to someone else's. I want to be able to exchange files, show my configurations, my code etc on my on my own monitor. I don't understand that gaming stuff. The only game I'll ever play is Quake(tm). It's strange how all the gamers nowadays refuse to play it. I wind up playing in single player mode... This LAN-party should at least let you bring your own harddrive, or something, to let you personalize the computer in some way.
How are we supposed to relate DM 4 million or AUD 5.2 million to real money?
Use a currency coverter, for example, this one.
100 megabit segments connected to switches (not hubs) and gigabit on the back end, would be ok. It's not really an issue unless you had the other people watching but that could be handled with an observer machine or two with tv out to a projector. Like another poster said, the banter is what really make Lan Parties. I think miking the final 32 like the XFL would be fun. Although if you make it that far, would you even speak?
They can really afford it what with all the teams they've been canning lately
http://www.eurogamer.net/news.php?id=5239
Have people bring their own computers and save the 4 million DM for rewarding the winner!
Well, anyone who plays Quake knows that part of your ability to play is how well you are used to your setup.
Which is great being at my level - it doesn't matter what setup you put in front of me...I can adapt to it instantly and continue playing at the same skill level I can on my home machine.
I suck at Quake, so it doesn't matter what you put in front of me - I'll still suck.
Do you really need a PC for each player?
Not just to get into the technical logistics of playing Quake on a shared system, but this machine's MINE! And I don't wanna share!
Well, anyone who plays Quake knows that part of your ability to play is how well you are used to your setup.. Microsoft Optical Mouse? Razor Boomslang? Grip Surface? Desktop surface? 20 inch monitor? 18?
.. but the bragging rights would be lessened since someone could always claim they usually play with their imported Genius mouse using their hand crafted mouse pad from Holland or something :)
I wouldn't want to play on a setup other that my own if it was going to count for anything. I've played at LAN parties on other peoples' computers and it definately takes a hit on your frag count. Don't get me wrong though, a huge LAN party would definately be fun
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I've already seen a few negative posts about this. MAN...didn't y'all hang on the demoscene!?
Getting together with other geeks to play and geek out is an essential part of our community. I don't care if you need to haul yer machine or not....brave that bright "Sun" thing, locomote yerself to yer nearest gathering o' geeks and make some friends.
Seriously. A friend probably introduced you to Open Source....gaming too. Might as well see if you can hook up with the fantastic 4 or the superfriends to make things better instead of scratching your head, looking at make errors and wondering where the other geeks are.
I can't make it to Deutschland, but if you wanna hang in the sf east bay....maybe we can coordinate something cooler, bigger and lovelier.
tack
"Let him go, Ralph. He knows what he's doing." --Otto Mann (simpsons)
I think the real intresting thing is the acknowlegement that sport is as much intellectual as pysical. It's not the physical act of sport that's the interesting thing...It's the means by which we organize our sporting activity based on what we can do that wins the day. I remember passing runners who were better than me on the downhill simply because I knew to relax and bound. They tried to run faster, I ran smarter.
In any case, it's all just amusement. I'm just glad that we have a physically non-violent way of thinking about how to get things done; and this helps
"Let him go, Ralph. He knows what he's doing." --Otto Mann (simpsons)
In the article they site that they will be the largest lan on earth - well not quite :-)
:)
:)
This easter we had a great time at The Gathering in The viking ship on Hamar, Norway as usual. 4500 (!) attendees brought their own computers, and once again it became the biggest temporary lan ever made.
100Mbit ethernet provided by Nortel, it worked mostly flawless, with exception of the normal power outages and bad switches.
I can truly say that Gathering is one of the most fun ways to spend easter, i got whupped in the quake3 tournament, but atleast i brought home 85GB of 'stuff'
Check out http://www.gathering.org for the lan site, and ftp://ftp.gathering.org has all the great compo-winners and demos.
As Director of QuakeCon 2001, I'd like to chime in here and add my agreement to those of you questioning if this is a good thing or even a fun thing.
// EvilJohn
// Java Geek
EA is providing the machines, what do you think the chances are of their being installed games they don't publish? Do you want to play Tribes2 at the next big lan event you goto? I know I do.
Providing machines for the tournament activities is a good thing, we do that at QuakeCon to prevent cheating, and to provide a level playing field. Input configs are allowed to be transfered to the machines, but most display setting changes are not. This tends to rub the players the wrong way, but after seeing what most pros set their config to, I think its understandable. Its a Quake3 Tournament, not a washed out water-color painting Quake1 tournament.
The money EA is spending, I think $2 million US, seems like a lot, but I can easily understand how it such a bill could occur. These events aren't cheap, but they are a hell of a lot of fun.
Without our volunteers we wouldn't be able to have QuakeCon, and I'm grateful, and proud to see how each of them do both during and after the event. Some of the key volunteers use QuakeCon as a resume item. They are very proud of the work they do. As they should. Last year we built a network for 1300 people on Wednesday. Hungover. By wednesday night, we were all gaming. Of course by Thursday we were all hungover again, but at least we didn't have build another LAN.
Building a large LAN party takes a great deal of resources, but if a publisher like EA controlled the event I don't think QuakeCon would be the same. QuakeCon is the Woodstock of Gaming, yes we get corporate support, but it has been, and will always be for the people. If they want to trade files in the BYOC, thats their business. Tired of fragging? Fire up your copy of Age of Empires. You can even play EA games if you want.
Two million US. Sigh, that would have been enough for EA to finish UO2.
Peace.
John "EvilJohn" Carney
Executive Director of QuakeCon 2001
eviljohn@quakecon.org
Less Talk, More Beer.
Not only major Corps, but also educational institutions, especially college, as well. Towards the end of last semester, I, along with a few other people commandeered a lab after hours and staged a nice lan party for a thursday night. To prevent cheating, we had a friend that works there pre-install the games (Mostly Half-life: counter-strike, and Quake 3) for us, and then we all just quietly came in and played for a few hours on the nice net work. Because the university doesn't like the games, they have the machines set up to ghost once a week (every friday), so with our planning, there was no trace that we really were there. Thank goodness for Ghosting and lab images...
File transfer tends to suck the bandwidth dry at LAN parties. Most people I know still use hubs at LAN parties, sometimes even 10 MB. Copying files at the same time as 3 seperate concurrent Q3 DM games on the same LAN tends to kill the LAN.
Even getting a cheap 8 port switch and organizing your hubs through the switch can help a lot though.
I very much like the idea of copying files at LANs, and I admit I do it myself, although I do try not to copy too much. If the networks were a lot more efficient (e.g. lots more switches instead of hubs) it would be great.
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I played in a local Quake3 competition last year. Each player could submit their q3config.cfg file, and these files were made available on the network. The computers were supplied, but you were allowed to bring your own keyboard and your own mouse. I also brought some utils in (e.g. ps2rate) on a floppy. They had 32 computers, and you were assigned to a specific computer only shortly before playing.
Overall, it worked well. People installed custom mouse drivers etc for their boomslangs .. didn't seem to cause any problems.
Having all the computers the same also ensures that someone doesn't have an advantage over someone else simply because they have the latest GeForce, 1GHz CPU, 512MB RAM etc.
There were no problems with file copying simply because players could not spend any additional time sitting around at the PCs. It was a standalone LAN, no additional PCs could be plugged in. Also the games were one after each other the whole time - so by and large, people were very focussed only on the games. Of course, this was a competition, not really a "LAN party".
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...what the limit is where adding more people to a lanparty begins to take away from the fun. It may be personal preference, but I've found that once a party expands to have more people than the game can accomodate, and multiple games start up in parallel, all of a sudden the screaming and taunting is out of sync, and IMO, that's one of the best parts of playing in the same room as your friends. Along those same lines, the larger a party gets, the more likely it is that participants will be required to use headphones, so as not to distract their fellow gamers. And of course, headphones help to kill the idle banter that people like me find so entertaining.
I could see a 32 or 64 person lan, but 3000 is just crazy. Also, with that many machines, I'm assuming each section would have a local game server. Otherwise, wouldn't the 100Mb links throughout the facility get saturated pretty quickly?
While I agree wholeheartedly with this AC that the level of dedication required for traditional sports far surpasses what's required for current electronic games, I also think that electronic games can already be considered sports, in the same way that chess and card games are sports.
And the whole issue of useless skills is purely subjective. Come wartime, I'd hope that the diplomats trying to negotiate peace had good poker faces, the generals running my country's army had the skills of a good chess player, while the soldiers in the trenches had the hand-eye coordination and ability to deal with high-pressure physical situations of a quarterback. Of course, I'd be worried if press releases came from Washington that the President was worried about a possible Zergling rush of the White House.
< tofuhead >
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It is still the dark of night.
Major corps dont have 3d graphics cards, trust me, I looked :)
How we know is more important than what we know.
I'm a little clueless here: Huh?
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Oh yeah, that.
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$4,000,000 AUD = 1,825,312.02 USD Got it from the xe.com currency converter.
Frankly, I prefer my 27" monitor...
Dive Gear
--- Think of it as evolution in action ---
At our school gaming is allowed fridays after 17:00 (the machines get ghosted in the weekend) all machines are equipped with a TNT2, the top of the line at the time the machines were bought, and these are machines mainly used for MS office. :) (I think the latter because they are located at and owned by the IT institution of the school)
so or there was a some manager who thought he should have the best stuff with no clue what he was doing OR someone ordered those with the intent of gaming
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Most prolly there ain't gonna be no more quake at tourneys.
With the CPL stating that it would rather get more maney than promote a professional cyber-athlete sport. Let's all play campershite instead! Whee...
-cough-
I for one love what Quake has done to my coordination and deathmatch skills, and if I stopped, I'd prob. deteriorate, so I'll continue to play regardless.
:)
lailoken.
Unless someone is lucky enough to have exactly the same setup as they provide you with, everyone ought to be at equal disadvantage for not being used to the mouse/keyboard/monitor/whatever.
I'm sure it would create a lot of administrative hastle, and wouldn't fix everything, but perhaps a selection of mice and keyboards could be made available? Not at the door, but if people were given some options at registration time, it might be feasible, and might reduce the difficulty in adapting. (Unless you prefer some offbeat mouse that's not on the list.)
Well, Given that they're all networked, an obvious option would be to have a machine monitor the executable file filesizes (across the network) to make sure that nothing changes.
If they're really concerned, they could run CRC checks on the game files, but that would take an awful lot of effort, time, and processing power, not to mention network bandwidth.
A simple, non technological measure, would be to have people switch computers every few hours. (They're all the same anyway, right?) Simply don't announce it ahead of time, and if the person who gets a machine next does better than they have all day, look at the files over the network.
Honestly, I can't see how someone could alter the game if your suggestion of disallowing internet access and restricting disk usage was followed. (By not having floppy/cd drives in the machines, for example.)
This is an interesting proposal, but I'll tell you this, and I'm not alone: I will not play on any computer but my own, ever, especially not at a LAN party. Moving to a new computer means moving to new input devices; I find it takes days at the very least to get used to new input devices. This would also be strongly discriminating against people with unusual control devices (joysticks, trackballs, DVORAK keyboards--yes, they are out there) and, much worse, people with unusual control configurations (I'm left-handed, and couldn't possibly play with any config vaguely resembling default. Including my scripts, my configuration is massive (I compile them with a preprocessor), and couldn't possibly be reconstructed by hand). If people were to move between computers, their configuration files, their input devices, and the drivers for those input devices would have to move with them--and since device drivers are arbitrarily powerful executables, that puts you right back at the start.
Another problem is that there actually isn't any working definition of what a cheat is. There are some things which are unambiguously considered cheats (distorting timedeltas to move at unnatural speeds, modifying video drivers to see the entire PVS), but other things aren't so easy to decide. One example is gamma-related video settings. Back in Counter-Strike 6.x, a video setting called lambert was discovered which could be used to cause other players to appear to glow. Opponents of it said that this was cheating, because it effectively gets night-vision goggles for free; I said that it was only evening an unfair advantage, because night-vision goggles didn't work on most hardware. Then, there's scripts, one of the most-misunderstood elements of the game. Nearly every advanced player plays with some sort of scripting in their controls, but some people consider scripts to be cheating, and some scripts are widely considered to be cheating. As a mod programmer, my opinion is that anything exposed by scripting functionality was deliberately enabled, and therefore is not a cheat.
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A picture is worth 500 DWORDS.
A copulation(corporation) should use this kind of event to solve a tricky development problem that has stumped their enormous IT resources. Then they can sponsor the event knowing they will get something good out of it :)
http://pcblues.com - Digits and Wood
Don't you think the money could be better spent on awarding better, or more, prizes to the top players? Wouldn't there be way more incentive for people to get into the game if they knew that the top 100 (or 50, or 30) players would receive kickass prizes?
;)
I mean, it's not like it's a huge hassle for people to bring their pc's in. I've never had any problems getting mine to an event and set up correctly, and it seems that the only people who do are those with faulty hardware (quickly remedied).
This would mean that there could be a greater number of really competitive players, each battling for the multitude of prizes, with glory being the optional extra.
OR, better than all that, they could just get people to bring their own machines whilst curbing the excessive (AU$195 = US$100!) entrance fee.
See, much more understandable!
Well, okay, one of the main reasons that
people bring their own machines is that for a
game of Quake, UT, or whatever, you have your
own settings.
At one side it is good that every gamer at the
event has his own machine, since it is a huge
pain to reconfigure the game or to configure it.
Also a good thing of that the machines are
already there, that you have the same version
(same patches) of the game on all of the
computers.
Another thing what they might want to prevent
is a little side thing at LAN parties: sharing
files and exchanging games, mp3s, tools etc?
It is still unclear what games will be played. Prizes have not been announced. The reason for providing the machines is probably not to avoid cheating. More likely it's a logistics problem to bring 3000 computers to the location and to provide power, network, IPs, etc to all of them in just a few hours. Judging from my experience with small events (up to 20 players), there's always at least one who "can't see anyone else on the net" or some other problem which needs the attention of an "admin". Scale that up and you know why they chose to provide the hardware.
Cheating is not black and white. Some even call a rocket jump script (or duck jump script if you prefer CounterStrike) cheating. Some think replacing models and tuning the graphics for maximum visibility is fine. It's a LAN, you can watch them as they play. It's probably harder to cheat undetected than to win without cheating.
I know... LAN parties should be about playing games primarily.
But when I was on my last LAN party (also my first one), I downloaded several GBs of stuff (No, I won't tell you what I got there... :).
So while the people at that EA Lan will be happy to play some of the games they like most (NBA, NHL & FIFA, how cool... *yawn*) there will be no file transfer.
Thinking about the stuff that you can get at a LAN party... maybe this is even what EA wants it to be? A LAN party with gaming but no "file transfer"? ;)
Two Worlds - One Sun [Spirit]
I read the translation link and as soon as I saw it was an electronic arts sponsered event I got furious.
I'm a ultima online player, in fact me, my dad and brother all share accounts. We're seperated by at least about 30 to 100 miles and we meet online and hang out.
This outrages me cause its 4 million dollars. 4 million dollars they could have spent fixing UO Third dawn. This new client is a complete piece of shit, constantly crashes, has a really bad memory leak that can use up a gig of swap in less than 30 minutes.
They could have used that 4 million dollars to pay the salaries of the OSI people they shitcanned too! Why the hell did they fire Richard Garriot a.k.a. Lord British? I guess when your wasting 4 million on something stupid like a lan event its easy.
This is why the dot-coms failed. Being a sysadmin in about 8 companies in the last 5 years as a contractor or perm, you get access to it all, one company I worked at when I started getting suspicious about where the money was going I opened up their quickbooks and saw money going into all kinds of stupid shit, mainly the CEO's pocket. This wasn't income money either, this was private investor money that was meant to take the company public, which it never did.
I'm gonna stop before I get too emotional and start a 3 page rant. Bottom line is EA is really showing their true colors by spending money in this fashion. 4 million i'm sure would have covered the salaries for all the OSI people they just fired. We know now it wasn't a money issue, but instead it was some sort of personality conflict issue or maybe an ego issue between the Execs at EA and Lord British.
Fuck you EA if any of you are reading this. I plan to make this news on every UO board I can find. Any company that has management that puts personal issues ahead of what the company goals are is doomed for failure. Whats that? You shitcanned all those people so your boss wouldnt shitcan you in order to buy your kid that GI Joe with the kung fu grip? I've been with you since the 8-bit days, stuff like pinball construction set, movie maker, reals of impossibility, ect, but I don't think I will ever support another EA product again, anyone wanna buy a account with a house on Moonglow tram?
O
o
.__________Toq
I can immagine the LAN parties at SGI but only if I don't imagine the word "Open" or the letters "GL".
major corps have LANs this large..You just need tie up your boss to make it a party
Without yuor own computer there to leech da warez and pr0n it's pointless
eom
PunkBuster was a valiant effort made by people who sadly have very little idea what they are really up against. Apparently...they still don't... Ditto. Anyone that would be able to compete at this level is going to be in a similar boat. Ok, this is pushing it, I think... A preprocessor?!?! What game are these configs for again? There is a fair amount of power in most FPS scripting engines...but not that much. I'd be very interested in what you found you needed to pass off to a preprocessor.
IMHO, it would be fine for most people to simply bring their configs on a floopy/CDR and loaded by an "official" of the event. Automated text scanners could detect most/all of the config cheats and such (lambert, gl_zmax, fast walk, etc). I'd say let them bring their own input devices. Drivers shouldn't be an issue, simply download them at the event from the company website. -Unless someone thinks that a gamer will have a friend at Logitech who will be able to get hacked drivers put up on the company web site for a day. Anyone with "off-brand" input devices could simply apply for approval before the event.
In the world of online gaming, there are tons of exploits at every level. Even simply tweaking the gamma level of the monitor in the basic Windows control panel can yeld HUGE advantages in tactical games such as Counter-Strike, as it effectively removes all dark hiding places. Monitors would have to have their configs locked down, including the external adjustments.
My
/.../almost breaking their back carrying their 19" monitor/.../
21", thank you.
Ah, monitor envy... isn't it great!
I for one welcome our new SCOviet Russian overlords to whom all our base are belong.
How long has Gymnastics been around? Relatively speaking, the video gamming era has just begun. What you consider "good" at Quake today, will likely be below average tomorrow. It's not harder to be a gymnast than a gamer. It's just harder to reach what the world generally considers to be a "good" gymnast than it is to be a "good" gamer. But what we consider "good" will change over time, and we will raise our standards as gamers get better and better.
Imagine someone that trains their whole life to play Quake (or some other video game). They work out their fingers (or whatever does the controlling) doing special exercises each morning. They cross-train and practice their response times and general hand-eye coordination playing other games. They eat a special diet which helps them focus mentally for long periods of time.
The interesting thing to see will be if professional video gamers will specialize in just one game. I don't think so since video gamming is so closely tied to technology. Baseball will likely not change that much over the couse of a person's life. But video games will always be changing.
"The only rights you have are the rights you are willing to fight for."
With the current state of the cheating community, I would figure that they would have to provide the machines. Think what would happen if they didnt!
For a prize this big, the operators would have to try their best to ensure that there was no cheating taking place. Since some of the gaming exploits are passive (can't be detected) it could give an unfair advantage to anyone who brought in their own box (and with it, their own exploits).
I would assume they would also have to ensure that no players brought disks/cd's/etc to the computers. Maybe make it so there is no internet access from the LAN gaming computers -- to ensure no other software could be loaded on.
Anyone think of other things that could help with that sort of thing?
----------- You look at life differently while suspended upside down and gagged.
Try dual 21 inchers. :) I almost fell down two flights of stairs at the last lan I went to!
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"The universe is a womb for the genesis of gods."
A great way to cut down on cheating, which is never any fun. Without access to the internet and disk, how can on install software? And even if they wanted internet access, why use Novel or something and allow the user only to run programs, and not access the floppy and cdrom drive, and not allow executeables other than the games be run at all? I also like not having to lug my computer and monitor all over the place just to play a day of games. My friends and I have recently decided that this is definitely the supperior choice. We now rent out the computer lab at one of our elementary schools to play LAN parties. The computers will run most games equally, and we avoid throwing the comps in the cars and moving them.
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Andy Tomaka
Kathleen
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Graphic designer and Mac lover.
Kathleen
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Graphic designer and Mac lover.
Yes.
While I truly do enjoy the large scale thinking, it may be a little overkill. For tournaments at our lan party, we run our first rounds on the BYOC computers. For the final rounds, games are played on a 10 identical pc's in a room seperate from from the BYOC area. So if someone is cheating on thier own computer, then they will be found out for the fraud they really are in the end. This isn't a perfect solution, but reality/cost dictates that for most lan parties this is a good way to keep everything as fair as possible.