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

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.

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?