Slashdot Mirror
Hints for Planning a Network Gaming Marathon?
"We have prior experience with private weekend-long gaming parties (with 20-30 people) a handful of times per year at the homes of attendees, and usually they conclude with few problems. However, we are planning on this session being bigger and more public, hopefully upwards of 120 seats. Although we have experience with smaller gatherings, we generally know all attendees, and have little experience with larger, public gaming marathons.
What did you do for advertising? Is it more effective to reach the intended audience by advertising on the radio, TV, internet, or billboard? What can you do about the rare, unmanageable, lunatic gamer? How have you handled cheaters (aimbots, wall-hackers, etc.)? Have you brought in sponsors to help offset the cost? Has there been technical support for the non-tech savvy? If so, was it free, or included in the admission cost? There are other questions, but I'll stop there.".
Bring in some people who can network computers well. 99% of the problems with BYOB events aside from Power is getting all those different computer talking to each other on a LAN... neigh impossible in some cases. =)
food....
Better yet, have games that are free (as all information should be). America's army is a good, completely free game.
-Libertarian secular transhumanist
If possible, supply a showering facility, and bring deodorant or air freshner. I've went to a few lan parties, and le me tell you the grease in the air, you can feel it just clumping on your skin.
after about 12 hours i was pretty much needing a shower just from being around so many unwashed geeks.
Make sure everyone has the games you plan on playing and the latest patches B E F O R E the event. It's rather annoying spending the first 6 hours getting everybody set up because each machine has it's own problems.
Oh, and make sure to devote a couple hours to mp3 swapping.
I am a filthy pirate.
Gamers are pigs. Extra wastebins everywhere, and extra ashtrays at the smoking area is a good idea.
Don't forget to hire a professional cleaning crew, for cleaning up after the 90% of gamers who can't hit the trashcan if it's five inches from their hand, and insist on messy food.
Also, quadruple the estimated time to pack up before the cleaning crew can do their job.
Other than that, whoever brings extra power strips, hubs and longer cat5 cables is going to be a hero. No arranger in the history of gamingkind has ever provided enough or long enough cables.
Provide everyone with a utilities cd that contains all the latest patches for the games you will be playing and maybe the latest nvidia and ATI drivers.
And if you're playing some free games, slap them on there too.
If you are planning to charge an admission fee (which it kind of sounded like you were) you should also require participants to agree to some ground rules. A verbal agreement might be sufficient but I would consider having them sign something at the time they pay their admission fee.
Basically you just need to establish what is acceptable and more importantly, what won't be tolerated and will get you thrown out. Things like cheating in games, rampant piracy, or conduct that is disruptive to another player (like bashing them over the head with your keyboard because you are angry at them for camping) should probably be prohibited by the agreement.
You might also what to establish under what circumstances (if any) a refund will be given.
Depending on the size of the gathering and the amount of money you are investing, you may want to consult with a lawyer about this agreement or at least try to find something boilerplate that you can adapt. The purpose of the agreement is to give yourself prior justification for the unfortunate possibility of having to kick someone out of your event.
Again, IANAL so maybe I'm completely wrong here, but if it were me I would at least investigate this kind of stuff and I'm guessing that this angle is easy to overlook when planning for an event like this.
------
Where are the slash-groupies? I distinctly remember being promised slash-groupies!
i used to throw parties when i was in highschool called "nerdsexfests" where 15 or so of my friends would come over and we would network and play doom, doom2, warcraft, etc. etc. i remember our first one was a little iffy because we had to go to fry's electronics to buy ethernet cards (BNC no less!) to outfit 80% of the computers my friends bought (we returned the gear the day after!!)
anyway, these nerdsexfests grew longer and longer. we did a two once and i'd say the most important thing about having a long lan party is *pace*...
Pace your playing (don't stay up *all* night), pace your food (junk food all day => feel shitty, want to leave)
We often interleaved playing actual sports to get our blood flowing...
and of course, there is nothing like good ol' loud techno blasting to keep everybody psyched...
pace, my friend
I've gone to many lan parties. From 5 people upto 100 people. I have to say the biggest gripe is power outages. Make sure you properly test the power network at the event location. Make sure you have ample power. Test everything. Make sure your network, power, and servers are up to the challenge. Also have backups! Things will die, make sure you have a few spares of everything. If your having the lan party in the summer make sure the place has sufficient cooling. When I went to lansanity someone turned the A/C up too high and it froze so it stopped working. Try having 100 people in a room and it be 95 inside. There were computers overheating all over the place.
I used to go to a local Cincinnati Lan party (SOGA), of around 100 people.
.iso anyways.
I stopped after the 3rd time.
1. The food sucked, they asked you prepay, and since I didn't have a credit card, I couldn't, so instead of ordering pizza with the money (the same amount the prepay guys paid to get it) that the guys who just showed up payed, they just got dicked over and starved.
2. If your going to set up FTP warez servers, have time limits. The staff at the lan was awsome, huge FTP server with tons of games movies and cartoons. BUT, it had a 10 person limit so that you got a high transfer rate, so basically the first 10 guys in the door would start downloading, and take all night downloading hundreds of gigs of stuff. I mean, it got a little redicoulas when the fat greasy guy next to me filled 2 hundred gig drives with shit he'd never use, like gigs of NES and SEGA roms or games I know he had because he was playing them, but was downloading the
3. Don't be afraid to kick someone out. The was this one guy (NOTE), who was a complete jack ass and ruined it for everyone. He would bitch and moan because he didn't have a game to play in a tournament, so would make everyone waite while he loaded and configured it, and then he'd bitch and say people cheated when he lost. Everyone hated him, but couldn't make him leave.
4. If your gonna have tournaments, have awards everyone can win. Instead of all time winner, how about...to compete you turn on replay mode, and then judge on the most gruesome death or most awsome kill shot, just don't let the geeky guy who does nothing but sit on his ass and play CS all day take home all the trophies.
5. Have a good sleeping area. Rent out a few hotel rooms if you do it there. The one I went to, it was just a big room, and you went in there, tons of people sleeping. I'd get into my sleeping bag (nylon goose down stuffed) and have people bitch at me because of the noise. I know it was loud, but I couldn't help it, and would have really like to be able to go somewhere by my self or with just friends.
Plus, have good security, I was really afraid to leave my computer alone while I slept, I actually use a bike chain and lock, and locked it to the desk. Even just an old laptop and a few USB webcams spread around would work.
5. Don't just play high end games, not everyone has that kind of CPU. Get some good strategy game tourneys going, like Alpha Centarui, or Civ 2 & 3, or even have a Quake 2 tournament.
I think everyone else hit the important stuff.
- don't let people without PCs in, unless you know them well.
The best way to implement this is to provide ID badges. You can buy the packets/cords/clips in a kit at any office store for around $20 per 100. Then just print something official looking and stick them in each one. Tell people that they need this badge visible at all times to be readmitted. Trust me, all kinds of lowlifes show up when they know that there will be $$thousands of hardware laying around a single chaotic room.
A friend of mine does this fairly often and he uses multiple 24-port 10Mb switches with 100Mb uplinks into a single 100Mb switch. This has several benefits. 1) They're cheap. 2) 10Mb is more than enough for games. 3) If people want to trade files (and they will) it doesn't congest the switches and lag the network.
Stupider like a fox! - H.S.
Get out, live a little
Who says all they do is game?
Afterall they're going to great effort to put on an event they'll like and it's going to take a shitload of work and education to get there.
This is well beyond 'just gaming'
They sound a lot more intelligent then your schoolmates that can't hold a decent job.
Creationists are a lot like zombies. Slow, but powerful and numerous. And they all want to eat our brains.
Can't go wrong with that combination.
Just make sure the BOFH has the nicest kit and plenty of beer.
After seeing that video clip of the guy who was caught cheating at a LAN party, two things came to mind.
1. Assault. The "security" guys were guilty of assault. You can NOT even touch someone. You can demand they leave and call the police if they refuse, but don't lay a finger on them. You can go to jail for this type of stuff.
2. Destruction of private property. Throwing the persons computer with great force into the parking lot had the expected result of destroying the computer. This is definately a civil offense. It may be a criminal offense in some jurisdictions.
The people running the event could have been open for some serious litigation had the person persued the matter.
I'm not condoning cheaters. I agree that they should be removed from the event. The wrong tactics, however, can gurantee you can never sponser another event because of liability problems.
You want to make sure you have liability insurance so you don't get sued out of existence by some asshole who trips over his own feet and breaks his leg because he hasn't slept in 72 hours.
-- Will program for bandwidth
Step 5: Get real - hire a booth babe in Xena garb and have her sell the drinks at 300% markup.
There is DVT (Deep Vein Thrombosis) from sitting in economy class too long, but you can also get this from sitting at your PC for too long without a break. For a laugh (in a vain attempt to take the serious edge off this) I will call the clotting of blood from sitting at your PC too long "Computer Geek Thrombosis" (CGT).
/. and laughed, but seriously don't let it happen to you (or people under your care at your LAN).
To avoid this you should make sure that every hour or so people get up and around. We acheive this at our lan's through:
1 - BBQ, Softdrinks, water etc, and place them at least 20 meters away from the action. It forces people to get up and walk, and at the same time they also tend to wander.
2 - Make sure there is lots of cheap water (not just coke) available, as water prevents dehydration, and it stealthily encourages people to go to the loo... heheh nasty when in the middle of a tough cs WAR.... but it might save youre life.
3 - Ensure that there is pizza delivery, again, people need to stop gaming, get up, walk around etc.
This may sound silly, but CGT is a VERY serious problem, one that people have died from. We have all read the anecdotes on
lounge around on the blue couch
Get some tools on the servers that can show traffic usage per IP possibly.
Then incase someone gets the bright idead to start DOSing the server, you can find their MAC, set the dhcp server up to give him/her an ip on a completely different subnet that's not in use. That or block his/her IP or something to get rid of him/her. And depending on the switches you use, you can quite possibly track them down.
The likely hood of that happening is slim, but just incase.
One other thing, make sure you have a few people who know how to admin the server/maintain everything else around the room so you can get decent playing time in. I ran a lan party for our computer club at school, and the janitors got the bright idea to turn of the A/C that night. So I was busy running around the school most of the time trying to find fans and ways to keep the room cool. That night I didn't get in nearly as much playing time as I would have liked.
Sure, you can put together a kick-arse LAN party without too much trouble. But if it's going to be big enough to attract attention from non-geeks nearby, then don't skimp on security.
The last organised LAN I ever went to (over a year ago now), I was mugged afterwards at knife-point. I lost my mobile phone and wallet, but they didn't take my computer which I was standing next to. Most probably because of all the friends nearby, the mugging caught them off guard and they didn't react to it, but taking my computer would have had a fair few people coming to my assistance.
Later the police told me that the area where the party was held was one of the worst crime neighbourhoods in Adelaide. Apparently people get mugged in broad daylight. So although the hall would have been dirt cheap at that time of night, it really isn't the right place to hold a LAN.
Even though the organisers also had someone steal a 24-port switch, they still wouldn't move the venue. They practically covered the incident up. The other gamers to this day are unaware of what happened and has probably happened pretty regularly since. The organisers did hire some security guards to guard the cars, but my friend who still attends that party tells me that his car got broken into the very next time he went.
So my advice to you is this: imagine how you would feel if one of your friends, or one of their friends, were mugged at knife-point. Or worse, if their computer were stolen. Then you will make the right decision about the venue and any security issues.
Don't be half-arsed about it, it's better to have less food and no theft, than for the majority to be happier while one person has a really rotten night.