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

Make sure you have

[shibbydude]

bathrooms...

Really good idea

[nidarion]

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. =)

Re:Really good idea

[retto]

Have one person assigned to be in charge of the network. Nothing is worse than having three or four people, that _kinda_ know what they are doing, all trying to do things their own way.

Lan Party setup tips

[leebrownusa]

http://www.lanparty.com/ has quite a few tips/suggestions for setup.

lanparty.com

[SnowDeath]

Read the LANParty.com guide and make SURE you have a power grid already mapped out so you can troubleshoot power failure on the fly. Also, have trash cans EVERYWHERE and designate ppl to take the trash out. Trust me

Alot of stuff can go wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

I've organiced several 200 ppl lan parties and i can tell theres always something that goes wrong.
The main thing to remember is that it IS work, not fun, if you want to do it for fun your in the wrong bizz. Also remember security, are you capable of throwing out people if needed. How about alcohol, fights? Warez? Whats your policy? Tech support, people always need help with tcp/ip, remember to always have a few people on call to help people. Power recheck power, recheck power again, i can't stress this enough, when ppl start rolling in and they put their machines on, arr...
Also remember that personal faulty equipment like a coffe cooker thats broken can shut down the power to 20-30 machines depending on your setup. Whos fault is this if a computer breaks? (it has happened several times) Do you pay? Be sure to have the answers.

Name

[qslack]

First, don't name it a Network Gaming Marathon. Some gamers might see the "marathon" and avoid your event.

Call it "extravaLANza." I dunno. I just made that up. Just name it anything that doesn't invoke images of sweat and toil.

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.

Re:Cheaters and such

[Anonymous Coward]

- 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.

Working on this myself

[bravehamster]

I'm currently in the final stages of doing something like this myself. We're gonna have ~128 people at the LAN. Here's some tips:

Go and talk with the manager at your local software shop. Chances are they'll be happy to place a flyer on the counter, and they may even be willing to help sponsor.
Give yourself at least 3 months planning time. You're gonna need it.
Set a minimum age and stick to it. We decided on 16, no exceptions.
Make it clear that cheaters will be evicted with no refunds.
HAVE SOME PRIZES - very important. Best Case, MVP, winner of tournaments. Sponsors can really help with this one.
For networking we ended up getting several cheap 24 port Dlink switches with gigabit uplink, then had an 8 port gigabit switch that they all headed into.
Get some volunteers to help with setup and takedown. Offer them a free spot, but make sure you can trust them to stay afterwards.
Keep the rules understated. Make having fun the priority but let everyone know on a basic level that the rules are there and will be enforced. Anarchy is not a good thing with respect to a good LAN party.

Have FUN! I plan on doing so.

128???

[Thinkit3]

Is this a computer thing, or do you just give rough estimates in powers of 2? Like, "There must have been 128 people at the wedding, maybe 256!" Oh by the way, decimal is evil and causes cancer.

Re:128???

[G27 Radio]

Ah, that must be why he chose 16 as the age limit. 8 would be too low, and 32 too high...

Re:STOP AIM

[invultor]

It sounds like your problem is having the wrong kind of people at your gatherings.

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.

I'd set an agelimit next time, above junior high, and you should be fine.

mod parent up, cuz i cant

[domninus.DDR]

badges really do keep people out pretty well. at the CPL last year this guy was like "let me borrow your badge for 10 minutes while youre eating"... why you ask? so he could go around and steal ram, mice, headphones, keyboards and mousepads. keep in mind gamers are known to spend 80 dollars on an illuminated keyboard and such.

DHCP and BOFH

[ebyrob]

Can't go wrong with that combination.

Just make sure the BOFH has the nicest kit and plenty of beer.

Re:DHCP and BOFH

[orius_khan]

[I have been involved in running 5 or 6 lan parties before. None as big as 120 people, but my points below are relevent anyway for anything larger than 20 where you don't know everyone personally already.]

A) Actually, I would strongly recommend AGAINST using DHCP. If it worked like it was supposed to, it would seem to be ideal for that kind of setup. Unfortunately, it never does. Somehow, with the combination of Win98/ME/2000/XP and Linux computers all stuck on the same LAN, there are always some computers that just won't get an IP correctly, and cant see the other computers. (You might be able to figure out the problem with some driver or something after hours of messing with it, but you don't want to spend that time.) The most efficient method we ended up using is giving everyone a small piece of paper as soon as they walk in, which contains:
1) Their name (real and in-game name)
2) IP address they are to use
3) workgroup name that everyone is to use
4) Table number that they are to sit at
5) the IP/computer-name of the "game" servers
6) the IP/computer-name of the "file" servers

(you could even go as far as numbering the seats at the tables, but you have to take into consideration that some people have gigantic monitors, or have shorter NIC cables, are really fat, etc., so you might want to let them pick their positions within the table.)

Everyone having this information cuts down on the repeated questions immensely. Along with these sheets to hand out, you have a master list which contains:
1) each person's name (real and in-game)
2) IP address they are using
3) Table they're sitting at
4) whether they've checked in yet
5) whether they've paid their money or not

B) The master list can be a file on your computer at the check-in area, or it can be a paper list with spaces at the end to hand-write in names of people who show up. Of course you also the need extra sheets with blank name spots to hand to those people too. If the master list is on paper, IT STAYS IN ONE SPOT THE WHOLE TIME, no exceptions. Loose paper and CDs get lost in a blackhole in seconds at a large lan party.

C) I highly recommend requiring people to sign up before the first day of the event. You need to know how much space you need, hubs/routers, cables, table/network layout, etc. Unless you work at a computer store where you can borrow a bunch of extra equip on short notice, you definitely need a good estimate of attendees. You can still accept people showing up at the door with no notice (there WILL be some), but it removes a lot of grief if you've already planned for them.

D) Don't plan on playing any games yourself. Now this depends on how many people you actually have working with you, but with 120 people under your supervision, you will always need at least 4 people to be "available" for all the little issues that come up. Now if you've got 10 of you running the thing, then you can rotate and still get some hours of play in, but you will be playing a lot less than people who are just there for the ride.

E) Make everyone handle their own food deals. It always seems like a good idea to get money from everyone and then order 20 pizzas, but with more than 15 people you end up with people who can't eat certain kinds of foods, or who dont like whatever it is that most other people are getting (pizza), or brought their own food and dont want to pay, or get out of paying somehow but then still eat the food (ie. you collected all money on the 1st day and some people only show up for the 2nd day), want to eat at a different time so there's either no food yet or it's cold/stale etc. You can have some common snacks/drinks included in the cover price, but that's it. You don't want to have to include 2-3 days worth of meals in the cover price, people will balk at it and not show up, even though they will be spending that amount of money on food themselves anyway.

Make up a list of directions to the nearest restaurants and phone numbers of places tha

Re:DHCP and BOFH

[orius_khan]

...CONTINUED FROM PREVIOUS MESSAGE...

[...security blah blah]
With 120+ people, odds are there will be several "Mister Angry's", and the only reason they dont annihilate the person sitting next to them at smaller LAN parties is that almost everyone there knows who they are, and/or where they live. If they're stuck in a room full of strangers, after the 10th time they get blown away by a teammate, someone's monitor is going thru the wall. Be ready to jump on it as soon as they stand up and start yelling.

G) Make Headphones Mandatory. No exceptions. If they 'forgot' to bring theirs, they have to play with no sound. You can't have 100 people all showing off their sub-woofers the whole time, it will be mass chaos because no one will be able to hear themselves think. If you want to be helpful/entrepreneurial, buy a bunch of cheap headphones beforehand and sell them to people who dont have any. You should also bring lots of extra (long) network cables and power strips to sell/loan to the people. Without fail, at least 2 person in a 30 person LAN party will FORGET their own NIC cable or powerstrip and won't be able to play. With 120+ people, you'd have to assume at least 10 or so.

H) Post a list of games that will be played at the event, and try to loosely schedule times to announce that "everyone is playing Counter-strike now", or whatever game you kids play these days heheh. Otherwise you will have lots of little factions of people who want to play a certain game, and with 120 people you'll have 20 groups of 6 people each playing their own favorite game. Defeats the purpose of having a large lan party and everyone will feel that the event sucks because they could play with more people at home on the net. You don't have to be too strict about it, but someone who is "in charge" is going to have to be a negotiator between the main factions, and get everyone to agree to "play BF1942 for 3 hours, then we'll play Counterstrike for 3 hours", etc. With 120 people, you can increase the number of simultaneous games being played to 2 or 3 probably, and still have full servers.

Also, if you have the hardware to spare, run dedicated servers for the popular games yourselves. Otherwise, you have 5 people who all start running servers for the same game at the same time, and people get split up into little groups again, waiting around for 'everyone else to join the server'. If you can't/dont want to run the servers for all the games, have some way for everyone to easily see the IP/names of the "officially sanctioned" servers, even tho it's just some random guy's computer actually running it. Like write big on a chalkboard or use a projection screen which most conference rooms have.

I) Download the latest patches/update files for ALL the games that anyone might play during the party and set up a file server to share them. Make sure you include the address(es) to access these servers on the little sheets you hand out. Assigning everyone an IP/table and giving them a central location to get patches will cut down on HOURS of people wandering between tables asking for CDs or the folder names on each others' shared drives. Actually, you'll probably want multiple servers doing this, but make sure everyone has the addresses of them. Now that BitTorrent is available, it would probably help dramatically reduce the load on the server's hard drive, which is usually the bottleneck in these situations.

Actually now that I think about it, if you've got the time/money/CDburner, you'd probably be better off burning all those files onto a CD and handing them out to people with their sign-in sheets. (We never actually tried this.) Only problem is, even if you only stick to 4-5 games thru-out the whole weekend, one or more of them will have a new patch released between the time that you announce the event and the day it actually happens, so you'd either have to burn them all the day before, or risk having some of them obsoleted. Dunno, something to think a

Re:DHCP and BOFH

[orius_khan]

...CONTINUED FROM PREVIOUS MESSAGE...

J) If you can pull it off, go and setup the tables in the room you're planning the event for, well before you announce it to the public. You want to get all the logistics of where chairs will go and how many hubs you need and where all the NIC cables will go and which switches they will plug in to, etc. LONG before people start showing up. You might setup half the tables and then realise that "Hey, there's no way in hell we can fit 120 people in here!" or "Hey, these 5 tables here that are supposed to plug into this hub here are more than 100 feet from it!" or "We've got too many hubs on this chain, boo packet loss!"

K) Sponsors: they're good if you can get them, but usually they'll only offer free stuff that they already provide (like a software games/package or free net access), which you can use as contest or random drawin prizes, but it's rare to find a company that will just give you cash in exchange for their banner hanging up or whatever. It's worth asking around for it, but plan on having to cover all of the costs of the event from the money you collect at the door and whatever you're willing to spend on it.

Also, on the food issue that I mentioned above: if it's a larger hotel that has restaurants in it, you can provide the menus of them and tell people to order from there, as long as you make it clear to the employees beforehand that NO ONE is allowed to charge to the "room" for their orders.

Well that's all for now. I'm sure there's more but other people will fill in the gaps. Have fun!

Tips & Pitfalls

[0nion]

As an active member of the set-up crew for The Big Crap Shoot, Ive seen a number of problems, running from the mundane to the bizarre. Ill try to break these down into a few main areas of concern:

Size
Make sure you have more than enough tables, chairs, and floor space for your attendees. I've seen attendance estimates very as much as 20%, and you never want to turn people away at the door, so always over-estimate your space requirements

Electricity
You'll have some attendees. who will bring machines that draw next to nothing, and others who will plug in giant subwoofers and space heaters. Spread your load over as many circuits as you can, and make sure you have plenty of thick-gauge extension cords.

Over a year ago, we ran an event at the local Masonic Temple. It's an old building, and some of us had power concerns from the start. Within two hours, we had run wires to every floor in the building, blown almost a dozen fuses, and destroyed the high-amp fuses on the main. (These fuses, circa 1936, were burned and torn in half)

Technical Support
Without fail, someone will set up, and their NIC won't work, their video card will fail, or they'll need to reinstall their OS. Chances are, you'll be enlisted to help resolve these situations.

Someone will forget a mouse/power cord/length of Cat5, so bring a few extra just in case. A decent percentage of attendees. won't have current patches for their games, so before hand, burn about a dozen CDs with patches for popular games, and hand them out as needed.

File Sharing
The biggest problem we've had to deal with recently comes from this department. When it comes to sexual content, we consider ourselves to be a PG-13 Lan Party. Until recently, we permitted the sharing of adult material, but we've had two recent incidents of inappropriate use. Now, we have a strict policy on the matter. Additionally, we've had problems with infected files/machines on the network. We still allow file sharing, but this may change if this problem continues.

If you do allow file sharing, you'll run into people that don't understand the concept of restricting their shares... You'll see entire hard drives with read & write permissions enabled. We haven't had anyone maliciously delete files off of someone's computer, but a few years ago, someone accidentally shared pictures of his naked wife lying in the bath. He was none too pleased to discover that the photo made the rounds.

Getting back to the inappropriate use subject... a few events ago, someone decided it would be a good idea to bring their LCD projector. Since we hold our event in an airplane hangar, it's pretty easy to set up a 20' screen. Sure enough, it only took a few hours before there were larger than life sexual acts being projected on the wall.

Other
Other than that, you'll run into issues about food & drink, sound (headphone requirements), tournaments, bathrooms, and trash. Use common sense, and these issues *usually* resolve themselves.

take it from someone who has helped put several on

[ophix]

first concern: power

we usually distribute power based on the assumption that each computer will use 4 amps. on a 20 amp circuit this means 4 computers (5x4=20, dont want to overload a circuit). you can get cheap 100' extension cords from walmart. put no more than 2 computers behind one (get some cheap power strips while you are at it). this works out well, it means you run 2 of these to a group of 4 computers (and there are 2 plugs on the outlet anyway). make sure you label EACH extension cord, on both ends. this is INFINATELY valueable when tracing down power problems. also make sure that you have a designated electrician who knows what circuits correspond to what outlets. DO NOT OVERLOAD a circuit. if you are hosting a 120 person event, assume you need 480 amps just for the players, not counting server row, consessions, lights, anything else. make sure you stay at or below 80% power usage for the facility you are at. you might look at getting power boxes or renting a generator from a local construction company. keep in mind generator power is not very clean nor natural to your pc. we got our power figures from lanwar, arguably one of the most successful regular lan parties in the usa. POWER IS THE MOST IMPORTANT CONSIDERATION

second issue: food

decide up front if entry cost will be paying for any/all of the food for the gamer.

either see if you can get some stuff donated or on a discount, or just go buy generics. there are always decent generic brands that are alot cheaper than normal name brands. people at lan parties are not going to care that they are drinking vess or big k as long as its halfway decent and there is plenty of it. you might also see if you can get some kind of discount on catering by a local food place, such as subway or a pizza joint. use the "you can only take 1 sandwich" or "you can only take 2 slices of pie" rule until everyone has had an opportunity to go through the line.

third concern: networking
hopefully someone in your group will be a good networking tech. decide up front if you are going to allow file servers on server row (i would advise against, alot of wasted gaming bandwidth). my advice for the networkside is rent out some professionals. www.lanrental.com, i knwo these guys, they know what they are doing. in any event try to build out a network with low latency and not high bandwidth (if you can get both then great, but latency is more important for a game lan IMO, and i dont even game at the ones we throw).

fourth concern: parking

minor concern i admit, but still one to consider. make sure there is enough parking. try to make an area where noone can park but is used for loading/unloading. call the local authorities and tell them what you are doing and where you are doing it.

fifth concern: bathrooms.

make sure that the bathroom facilities are ample and work. this is especially important for multiday events. you might consider offering a location for the attendees to shower.

sixth concern: sleeping/chilling locale.

mark off an area for sleeping. sleeping under your computer with people walking over you sucks. set asside an area with a decent sized tv and vcr/dvd player or run a video projector. have alternate entertainment past the attendee's own pc.

seventh concern:

have people who are definately designated as in charge at all times. they should all wear the same shirt in a bright colour indicating they are event staff. always have someone on duty at a helpdesk or where they can be reached.

please mod this up, should be rather informative