Hints for Planning a Network Gaming Marathon?

Malfaetor asks: "Some friends and I are tentatively planning a public Network Gaming Marathon (LAN Party, except for an entire weekend) later this year, starting on a Friday night and ending the following Sunday afternoon. We've already acquired a file server and game servers, as well as did some testing on bandwidth usage of various games. We've also queried local hotels for available conference rooms, and thought about power consumption requirements, and so forth. I ask this of my fellow Slashdot readers: If you have ever hosted or attended a LAN party before, even if it was not of this scale, would you have any input (or horror stories!) that could help to ensure we have not overlooked anything? Any information you could provide would be greatly appreciated!"

"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.".

Comments

Re:Here's a hint...

[shibbydude]

I wish I had some moderator points! Moderators, mod this man (or woman :)) up. Small lan parties are fun. By small I mean less than six people. Trust me, I have been to some with my friends and it is a decent way to spend a friday night... once in a while. But huge lan parties become boring. I have never participated in one, but I have gone to one and as soon as I saw what a drag it was I left in a hurry.

Cheaters and such

[Judg3]

Are almost non-existant (I have yet to see one, in my 300+ lan parties I've been too).
Quite a diffrent thing when you can look at the guy next to you and see him wallhacking, or aimbotting - it's pretty blatant. He'd kick a nice swift kick in the head, and be labeled a lamer.

One thing about planning large scale parties - don't let people without PCs in, unless you know them well.
Being stuck at a LAN party without a PC will lead to the pickpocketing and other such mischief that will give your lan party a bad name.

Also, make up a bunch of "packets" of info. Inside the packet, have a little map with the location to the bathrooms, the name of the game server, the IP they can use (or if it's DHCP), and even their place at the table if you have assigned seating.

Make sure to have a couple of 55gallon garbage cans handy, and assign someone as the garbage man - making sure the trash cans arent overflowing, spills are cleaned up, etc - trust me, this is a must.

There's so much more info and hints out there, I'll let some others answer it.

Hell, every thing you need to know about it has been graciously already written for you by lanparty.com.
It's called, simply enough, "The Guide" and covers everything pretty well. Read it.

Power

[Whatever Fits]

Take whatever you think you will need and double it. Specifications only go so far. A 15 amp breaker might trip at 10 amps after it has "warmed up" under a 14 amp load for several hours. Had that happen. It didn't just trip the breaker, but burned it out. Test the power outlets with large loads before the party. Breakers get old and wear out.

I don't know what to do about networking for that scale. Gets scary at anything above 40-50 people. Our parties run between 35 and 50 people and we have some serious networking hardware borrowed from a company one of the guys works for.

Also, we have sponsors. Lots. We have several local companies sponsor with trinkets and t-shirts for door prizes as well as some big names sponsor with certains CPUs and graphics cards that they make. We actually got an entire server from one company. Awesome box too, not some throw-away.

Once you get one good sponsor, that validates the rest of them to do so. Also, we got onto TV on the largest news station in the city. That helps. They were doing a human interest story on gaming. Just so happened we have a good website that was easily found on a search engine.

Re:Power

[FueledByRamen]

3 amps may sound like a lot for one device (given that most household circuits are in the 15-20 amp range), but for a computer, it's really not enough. Your average computer (that will be brought to a LAN, think high-end) draws 250 watts and has a 150-watt monitor attached. That's 400 watts, while 3 amps at 120v is only 360 watts. You're going to end up blowing a circuit over that. God help you if someone brings a dual-processor computer, especially an Athlon or dual P4-Xeon - those things suck 400+ watts, easily.

Interesting power-related story: I was at a LAN, and a friend brought his Back-UPS 500 (that I loaned to him a while back), to prevent power losses from affecting his computer (XP1900+ with a Radeon 9500, nothing special). Unfortunately, the 2 outlets coming off of it weren't enough, so he plugged a power strip into it. I think you can see where this is going, as people tend to daisy-chain the power strips. When the power finally did go out, there were 6 or so computers plugged into that poor little UPS (11 total into the 30-amp circuit, powering up the 12th blew it). It went SCREEEEEECCCCHHHHH as the "power out" and "battery low" indicators came on simultaneously, and nearly caught fire (the battery's side bulged out and it started smoking). Don't do that.

STOP AIM

[Hilleh]

Maybe this doesn't apply so much to large gatherings where # of people on a server at any given time isn't a problem, but for those interested in smaller LAN gatherings, this may be helpful.

Keep the internet connection (whether it be modem or router) near to where you sit, and have it unplugged except for patches. Why? Because a lot of people are morons, it's hard to find an ideal group. One time, we wanted to play NWN but the kid who had the server cracked (unfortuantely people who buy games like me are a minority and thus we needed a cracked server to play) said that he "needed" to talk on AIM. And no, he couldn't tell us where we could find the crack.

This has happened dozens of times to me before I wised up. One kid had his semi-girlfriend dump him on AIM at a lan and he spent the rest of the night being a whining pussy. Like I wanna hear about that when I'm at a party. Story in point, crap like AIM and mindless websurfing can convince people to forget that they're there to play games, and in smaller LANs that's a real bitch when you're trying to fill up a server.

Or maybe I'm just anal about this?

Yeah...

[c0dedude]

This should go without saying, but don't forget Cat 5's. Someone always forgets his, we all can make them, so bring a few extra. Not a big deal. And power cords. And label them so you don't lose yours, though Cat 5's are cheap.

learned from experience

[soren.harward]

I once did a five-day LAN party, hosted in my basement while my parents were out of town :). Looks like you covered most everything, except two necessities.

• food Make sure there's enough to eat for everyone, because even after being sedentary for 8 hours your stomach starts rumbling. And after eating junk food for 24 hours, you start craving something nutritious.
• sleep Most people don't have the stamina to do anything for more than 18 hours straight, even if it is just sit at a computer and play games. You are going to want to crash some time, so provide places to sleep.

Other than that, I suggest you have some movies available, because gaming is competitive and intense, so it's good to just relax for a while. 2001: A Space Odyssey is just wonderful at 4 am.

DON'T USE FIBER!

[molo]

DCCon (3?) used fiber one year. They got a sweet network donated by bay networks or someone.. and it included a bunch of 100mbit full duplex ethernet switches that used fiber for switch interconnects. (this was like 1998) The problems were that the fiber was run between tables, and people kept knocking into it or even stepping on it.

At the beginning of the day, the network was clean, no PL, no lag. By the end of the day, the game was all kinds of choppy (NetQuake, btw) and the PL was horrible.

Take it from me, USE COPPER ONLY. Especially today with the affordability of 100mbit ethernet. Gigabit switches/hubs are still expensive, but it is an option for the backbone.

-molo

The Essential Liquid: Water

[Chucow]

Everyone keeps recommending Bawls, Jolt, UberCoffee, and the usual assortment of junk food.

And all of that belongs at a LANparty, absolutely. What would a LAN be without caffeine and greasy food to blame your bad performance on? (ie: "The only reason you fragged me was because my hand was so greasy it slipped right off my mouse! ::mutter::lucky bastard::/mutter::") Makes you feel better to.

But never will I go to a LANparty without a gallon jug of water for myself. Spacing caffeine and junkfood with water is good, keeps you from eating too much crap and prevents acid burn from eating pure junk for >24 hours.

Just my .02$, and apologies for slight rambling.

Answering Questions and Keeping Things Controlled

[megabyte405]

Have at least one or two people who don't expect to play games, at an event that size. Preferably, hook one up with a Linux box with all the hacking^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hsecurity tools you'll need to take care of the rogue DHCPer's or equivalent (as already noted). Something not noted, as far as I can see: Have a Windows box with popular trojan clients (SubSeven, BO2000, etc) scanning for servers to make sure that nobody can ruin anyone's fun with a trojan before you warn them and clean them.

Make sure there's a big sign over the "Help" people, so the average gamer doesn't get ticked off by Mr. Rich Parents who can't figure out how to run a program that's not in his Start menu. :-)