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Ultimate Guide to Hosting a LAN Party
WebWord writes "The title says it all. This really is the best damn guide to setting up a LAN party I have ever seen. They cover all the details from equipment to food to network protocols. Excellent!"
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A mate and I set up a Quake2 party complete with a digital projector set up on a seperate machine on the network using the "camera where the action is" mode and..... no bloody one came. Everyone wanted to go see anyother stupid hollywood flick. :(
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?
This only applies to smaller at-home LAN parties, as I have never been involved in organizing a large 20+ persons LAN party.
Anyway, my experience is that you shouldn't overplan what activities/games should take place/be played when you are throwing a LAN party.
Mostly, just going with the flow is a really good idea, as pressuring people into playing a game they might or might not want to play, most often leads to a lot of bitching, and generally unsatisfied players.
Another thing you should consider (when hosting at home), is to offer other activities than LAN gaming.
Ofcourse, if you only have a weekend, then this mig ht not be all that important, but when we do LAN'ing, most of the participants take a week of from work, and then we do a 10-day stretch, and THEN its important to offer other activities, such as DVD movies (if you can get a projector, its a BIG thumbs up, ditto for a decent 5.1 surround system), if its summer, setup a barbeque, take an afternoon on the beach, etc.
I've found that this is a really great idea, which makes participants happy, and gives a generally much better ambiance at the LAN party.
A guide like this has existed for quite some time. Check out lanparty.com. It rocks!
Here's a direct link to their guide to hosting a lanparty
http://www.lanparty.com/theguide/
No. The first rule of the LAN party is that you don't talk about the LAN party.
I just recently got into using optical mice, and I love them-- for some reason (maybe it's my own fault) dust and whatnot screws up old-style ball mice for me faster than anything (sometimes to the point where left/right motion won't function).. with this optical mouse though, there's just about nothing that can cause me to have that same experience. As for your concerns about "pointing better and tracking more accurately", I believe they are unfounded. Microsoft's IntelliMouse Optical, IntelliMouse Explorer and Wheel Mouse Optical all take snapshots 6000 times a second-- that's more sampling than your typical ball mouse receives. (Granted, it likely never sends all that data down the wire, but it does likely process this data in the mouse to create a more accurate representation of your movements.)
I dunno, maybe it's different mice for different folks, but you should give them another chance. =)
All I know about Bush is I had a good job when Clinton was president.
Firstly, there is a lot of different types of LANs.
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I started out doing a 2 player thin coax LAN at my house.
That balloned up to a 12 player coax LAN at my house.
Then it became a 10/100 2 5-port hub, 8 player LAN at my friend Mikey's house...
The next step was a 40-50 player LAN in nice comfortable leather high back chairs and rented hotel space.
And now it's a 100-140 player LAN at Stars recreation center (www.stars.com) in Vacaville.
For lack of a better term I turned "pro". I now do it for money. Once you make the jump from garage LAN to paid LAN you have to keep the atomsphere of the garage LAN but deliever the reliability, power, and network of a professional LAN.
Garage LAN:
DIVERSIFICATION
Some people are console freaks, some people are PC freaks. Have plenty of both. Consoles are great, because you don't have to blow $500 to play a game. Big screens with movies are good too (but watch them copyrights on public viewings!)
PARTY ATOMSPHERE
Keep it relaxed and enjoyable. Do not break out the fine china and do not throw a LAN at a house or location with fine China to break. Loud music (techno, phat beats, or rock) is a must.
Professional LAN:
POWER
Buy, rent, or steal enough power so that there is never a blow circuit. Waiting an hour or so for the circuit breaker to cool down is retard (Go morons in Sacto!).
NETWORK
9 ms ping is your target. Have you ever tried to lightning gun in Rocket Arena 3 with higher than 50 ping? It sucks so much ass... Do you know how evil a railgun is at 9 ms ping?
Internet access is always very nice. More is better, but a little with do. If you have multiday events it's great to check your email. (Gets people to advertise your event to their buddies
SPONSORS
Everyone likes to get something for nothing. Give away prizes. Get some local or national company to pitch in and just give the stuff away. It's not that big a deal, but to a gamer it makes all the world.
TOURNAMENTS
Everyone likes to win too. Not only do you get the sweet file sharing at a LAN, but you also can prove your skilz. Run a baby single elimination tournament and then ballon it from there. Double elimination is good if you can handle the logistics... It gives everyone 2 games at least... even the people that suck at Quake 3 like me
LEGAL
If you allow minors, back off the pr0n and alcohol. You need stated policies and enforcement against them. That's the damn rules
Ok, it's 3 AM, I'm going to bed. Gamerzday is always looking for more locations to LAN... got any ideas?
(Damn it's 3:02... It took 17 minutes!)
-Tom
Um, no. DHCP isnt hard to setup, and any linux geek could download dhcpd and the sample config works fine. And @home/dsl(some) peeps seem to use dhcp anyways, all lan parties I goto use DHCP so nobody has to give out settings. Plus you can do cool stuff like playing with DNS and redirects. So people can hit the fileservers without knowing its ips. http://files and they can get all the mods/patches.
I personally love DHCP, I can plug in my work laptop at home and not reconfigure any tcp/ip settings. I even tweaked my dhcpd.conf so that my MAC address gets the same IP and network settings for VPN.
Also, Now that switches are cheap, might as well spend the extra 10-20 bux and get a switch. 8 ports switches are like 40 bux now.
Things that are important to us:
- DHCP - I know people say its simpler to let Windows arrange the networking by itself, but generally all my friends houses (that are big enough to have a LAN party at) aleardy have DHCP, and Windows messes it up sometimes anyway when there's lots of people. Plus, DHCP will set up your internet gateway and DNS too
:-)
- Air conditioning - Even with 5 people in a small room on a cold day it gets pretty warm pretty quickly
- Be near a shop - No matter how prepared you are, you'll always need more food (unless you're rich and over-buy to start with
- Someone experienced in networking - It sucks when people get confused about what an uplink socket is for. You should have someone that knows all about it overseeing the network setup.
- Installation Disks/CDs - We had one computer refuse to see the network and refuse to re-install its network drivers, so it needed Windows re-installed (typical); and another lost its registry and didnt have it backed up. it's always a good idea to have Video, Sound, Network and Windows installation CDs with you.
- Internet - People need a break from gaming at some point and most geeks need to check their mail. I've also found this to be useful for downlaoding latest patches, using USENET (or Google) to find the answer to some strange compatability problems, etc.
- Music - The louder the better. And make sure there is one source of music (people's PC should be playing sound effects - not music. If its' mp3 music, get it all onto the machine thats's going to play it at the start so SMB file transfers aren't slowing down the network during gameplay.
My friends and I haven't ventured into the organized type of party where there are tournaments and prizes, but I think we'll be trying that next time, just for a change.P.S. Why do people try to bring up the subject of terrorist attacks in nearly every slashdot discussion? That's really annoying to some people. If you're going to discuss terrorism, do it in a newsgroup about terrorism, or current events.
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The last LAN party I went to was real fun. We had a projector which played a few good/bad movies(it doesn't make Joes Apartment any better), but momre importantly, we had tables.
Nothing is more fun than having a DJ spin while you're playing Counterstrike, and having a large projection(life-size) screen of someone playing Cstrike on that.
Then when we were all gamed out, we watched Quake 1 and 2 done quickly, some strange music videos(one from Atari Teenage Riot involving erasing faces) and had a blast.
It's all the music of a rave, without the fucking e-tards, cudddle puddles, or police involvement.
This post was really a trick to get all of the dorks to confess. I will now be taking your lunch money and delivering wedgies.