MillionManLAN Party: The Doors Are Open

socram writes "Tom's Hardware has an overview about one of the biggest Lan Parties. This event is sponsored by AMD, ATI, ASUS, ABIT, Cisco, NVIDIA, and the Hitachi storage division. Check this article out, more than 1000 people killing their brain cells! Presentation by ASUS, ATI's Q&A Session and more."

Comments

yeah but in Louisville, KY ???

[malakai]

why?

Hell, pick Orlando so people can do a theme park or something else that makes the trip more worthwhile. Or those with families can let the kids go do something while they hang out geeking.

LA, NYC, Orlando, New Orleans... the places are well known. All major events occur at them. They are picked for good reason....

Louisville, KY??? what are they smoking. No wonder they can barely break 1k people.

-malakai

Sponsor Talks

[Eberlin]

I guess this is what happens when you have a giant corporate-sponsored lan party...you get lots of advertising and sponsor hype.

I mean think about it, the spirit of the lan party is in gathering your friends for hours of fragging and trash-talking. In a giant event like this, you're stuck between uber 1337 n1nj4 d00dz (strangers telling you to ph33r them, j00 n00b!) and companies advertising products in your face all day.

I'd take a teeny little router with a few friends any day instead.

Re:Sponsor Talks

[deadsaijinx*]

agreed, LAN parties should be about you, your 30 closest friends, and that dumpster you plan on diving into. On the other hand, at these huge ones you could score some free MoBos, and all you have to do is shave and paint your head ;]

Unfortunately, LAN parties will soon be illegal under the DMCA, as they provide some of the fastest pirating networks available.

Re:Sponsor Talks

[mrpuffypants]

I always thought that the minute you invote companies into an event you become their whores too. Then I went to QuakeCon and learned that the vendors and the BYOC can comfortably co-mingle without becoming too much of a hassle and in your face.

Or perhaps it's just that they pick vendors that respect the gaming community. I never felt any pressure to go over to ATI's booth last year and really do anything. They had a great idea for their booth: a "chill-down" area, where geeks could go to watch a movie, drink some free Bawls, or just sit around and chat with friends.

In the BYOC the vendors are not intrusive at all; they segregate the money from the fun, and in the end it becomes a great event to see what these companies have coming down the pipe for us and also to talk with friends about stuff like frags and farts that people will never live down.

1000 is pretty small...

[Hackie_Chan]

I've been to Dreamhack twice now and they've estimated everything from 4000 to 6000 people.

How's that for a Lan, Tom'sHardware?

QuakeCon

[mrpuffypants]

I'm not sure how appropriate it is to call the LAN party the "Million Man LAN" when only 1000 people are expected to attend.

This year QuakeCon in Dallas will have 2,000 BYOC attendees, with 3,000 total people expected to show up.

Opinion on TomsHardware?

[Anonymous Coward]

Mod me offtopic if you want, but since the article references Tom's...

I have used Tom's site for a reference for a few years now and I was wondering if anyone else has noticed a drop in quality or even a dreaded 'selling out'. I find this sad, since I read with great interest during Tom's crusade against RAMBUS when most of the other PC press was buying into Intel's BS about RDRAM.

As evidence of a difference from the hard hitting reviews of yore, I present:
Tom's watered down review of the Hydrocool200: http://www6.tomshardware.com/cpu/20030616/index.ht ml
And HardOCP's complete panning of the same product: http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=NDUx

Any thoughts?

Why wasn't there a story about this earlier?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm near Louisville and would have loved to have gone.. I didn't even hear of MMLP 1 let alone 2...