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Anatomy of a LAN Party?
malfaetor writes "My colleagues and I are interested in improving on an annual public LAN Party that we first held last year. Before the event, I asked Slashdot, and received some terrific suggestions. The event ended up being quite a bit of fun, and we had very few technical issues. However, there were some non-technical improvements that could be made. We did not break even financially, and ended up having to divide the loss among the seven of us. The biggest financial killer for us was insurance, at nearly $500 for the event. What have other LAN party organizers done about insurance and legal issues? Has insurance (or lack thereof) come back to haunt anyone in the past?"
"We've also had trouble deciding which network games would be the most popular. Our group has tried to focus on games that are the most familiar (or at least the smallest learning curve), and that most individuals already have installed. What games have been the most popular at LAN parties you have attended in the past six months? We know many individuals with consoles, but are unsure if promoting the console gamers would be a large draw. Have consoles been a common sight at the LAN Parties you have attended? If so, have you had any problems related to having to juggle both console and PC players?
Advertising was also an issue. We ran a grassroots advertising campaign because radio and TV advertising were too costly to be considered. However, we were concerned that the flyers we created and the postings we had on certain websites were not reaching enough local gamers. Strangely, local game shops have been very hesitant to allow us to place flyers there. What creative ways have other groups used in the past to get the word out?
Our webmaster has done a great job so far in getting sponsors. Sponsors have been very good to us, but other events that have been around longer seem to have quite a bit more swag to give away to the attendees. Is the real trick to getting sponsors to have longevity, Get Big, or have the organizers donate a whole bunch more money toward the cause to purchase these prizes themselves? Do local sponsors tend to give more than big national sponsors? Does anyone have any tips or tricks for approaching sponsors?
Lastly, has anything changed in the LAN Party scene in the past year? Has anybody seen or been involved in any noticeable trends, or have experiences worth mentioning?"
Advertising was also an issue. We ran a grassroots advertising campaign because radio and TV advertising were too costly to be considered. However, we were concerned that the flyers we created and the postings we had on certain websites were not reaching enough local gamers. Strangely, local game shops have been very hesitant to allow us to place flyers there. What creative ways have other groups used in the past to get the word out?
Our webmaster has done a great job so far in getting sponsors. Sponsors have been very good to us, but other events that have been around longer seem to have quite a bit more swag to give away to the attendees. Is the real trick to getting sponsors to have longevity, Get Big, or have the organizers donate a whole bunch more money toward the cause to purchase these prizes themselves? Do local sponsors tend to give more than big national sponsors? Does anyone have any tips or tricks for approaching sponsors?
Lastly, has anything changed in the LAN Party scene in the past year? Has anybody seen or been involved in any noticeable trends, or have experiences worth mentioning?"
Things may be different where you are, but in my area, the geek community is pretty tightly knit. Generally, word-of-mouth is the best form of advertisent. Tell the local geeks at high schools, colleges, etc. People who would be willing to attend a LAN would hear about it eventually, from other people who would be attending it.
eclecti.cc
You may be able to get sponsors for snacks, drinks, etc. If you convince enough people, you may also be able to get the speed stick folks to supply deodorant to the literally unwashed masses. :)
I've never been to a LAN party so my input will not weigh as much as those who have. However, it may be worth listening to in order to attract the demographic.
Have refreshments and clean bathrooms. Make the machines comfortable to use. If people bring their own kit, be sure to have enough people who have the same games installed to make a decent game or two. If possible, try to moderate the games with some sort of ranking system where the n00bs (like myself) don't get 0wn3d too much by those with m4d 5k177z. I say let them play in their own high-ranking games.
As gaming in general has moved away from the socially unacceptable geek culture and towards mainstream, you'll be gathering an ecclectic group of people with different social skills. Be sure to have enough space for divergent cultures to group themselves. Social retards like myself need to hang out with others like me (I know there are others out there, damn it!) while the more pop-culture trash talking "you are teh suxor" group can have their pissing contest elsewhere.
I enjoy FPS games (ET, UT, TFC), but am not too much into the strategy types (warcraft/starcraft) . I'd go to LAN party events (and would gladly pay theme-park-like admission for a day's worth) but am wary that it's not a social environment I'd be comfortable in.
In any case, good luck to you.
Maybe sell T-shirts - have some onsite, and set up a CafePress store to sell more of them in case you run out?
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
So I pretty much only play Xbox Halo these days. Sometimes we have a War/StarCraft party, but more and more often I only play Xbox. I like the fact that you share screens since it means that you can see where your teammates are, and it is more social.
I have also noticed that it is easier to get girls to play on a console than a PC, YMMV, but there is something to be said for having a mixed gender party.
BølerLAN is held by me and some of my friends two times a year. Around 60-70 people are coming each time.
:P (for the record, codebreaker had 200 people in one game).
The event is being held at the local school. We are also lucky that the district council is sort of sponsoring us with manpower that is used for security and running a nice non-profit stand with various food and candy.
The killer event is the Quake 3 Special Event. It is a concept that i borrowed from CodeBreaker. Two rounds of deathmatch that lasts 20 minutes each. 38 of 60 people joined the game, and we had much more fun than with Ut2k4 1on1
Dvorak on Doomtech
Indeed. I always thought that idea was implicit in the word "party," but what do I know?
KFG
Even if you make all the attendees sign a permission slip saying that you're not responsible for them or their hardware and that they understand that LAN parties, like bungee-jumping, are an inherently dangerous activity, and that they agree to pay for any damage they do, you still need to protect yourself against attendees doing dangerous or stupid things. Because there's some reasonable probability that they will, and either you won't be able to figure out who it was or they won't have the personal assets or insurance to cover it. Maybe they plug their PC into 240VAC and the blue smoke gets out and sets off the sprinklers, or maybe they plug their Ethernet into the building PBX jacks and fry the PBX (yes, I know RJ45 is designed to discourage problems like that), or maybe their extra-high-power 802.11b card triggers the garage door opener and some outsider steals the snowplow, or your PCs use up too much power and a circuit breaker trips, taking out the coffeepot in the lobby, or who know what other stupid things can happen.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I run a LAN party in the UK thats been getting bigger for afew years (www.thebiggame.org) - we've had public liability insurance (protects against people killing themselves) since our event hit ~60 people attending, but what you're paying is covering us for a whole year (in which we run up to 4 events).
:P
:)
As for consoles, we did allow people to solely bring consoles for a while, but found nobody actually bothered. It seems console gamers don't want to sit and just play games for a whole weekend; however, the consoles make a great break from pc gaming, and are good for quick tournaments. We've usually got an xbox and ps2 connected up to a projector as well as ProjectorGames who have a pretty unique product, I'm not sure if they'll travel out to the US though
For advertising, the best is word of mouth, but before we got a bigger following posting at schools/colleges/universities gave us great success - We also got an interview on local radio, as the event can be passed off as a local community type affair.
Sponsors do seem to only look for a proven record and shear numbers of attendees, so make sure you've got a good record of past events on the site. You might want to target local firms to start with, these will benefit from the targeted advertising your LAN will offer, as the small (comparatively) attendance of your LAN could mean a large increase in customers for them.
The main trend with LANs seems to be they're getting more popular, but also, the big ones tend to become really corporate, so maybe the niche is not to sell out?
Of all the lan parties I've hosted most of them take 2-4 hours to setup because not everyone has the same games, or their computer is horribly set up. Where with 4 tv's, 4 xboxs and halo it takes half an hour to set up, and about the same to shut down, and can be a lot more fun than counterstrike.
Matt
Lots of people would like the LAN party idea if they simply only knew what it was. Many of my buddies (long time computer guys) are just now learning what games like Evercrack or Counterstrike are and what a real multiplayer experience is. The best damn way to promote these things is do demos and to get flyers taped to games at the stores that sell the multiplayer games you are offering. Charge a small entry fee and split it down the middle with the store that got you the referral. This doesn't have to be much mind you, just enough to cover some network cabling/power bars and network cable/hubs. You don't care if you break even on this one, but the event will never happen if you don't buddy with someone to make it happen and let someone know about it. If you don't charge anything for it, people will think you are not worth the time because you don't even put a price on it. If rations and equipment are covered all you will be worried about is how many people you frag. As it should be!
In running a few little events myself the "ramp up time" does matter. You will get many more people with a years notice than you would with six months, and if you are talking 3 months or less lead time I wouldn't even bother. It simply takes time for people to tell their buddies about the event and for people to see your web links and ads. For these smaller events you need lots of time for them to really work. It's the difference between your event breaking even/profiting and you losing money. Even if you don't want to profit on it a serious gaming event costs money to put together, and the people coming know it costs you something so don't feel bad about sharing the costs with them.
-Mind
And no parent has ever sued a school for harm to their child even after they signed a permission slip granting free reign to the school to do with the child as they please?
And no insurance agency has ever fought a claim?
Try asking someone with "health insureance" if they feel like they still have to worry about their medical bills.
Life is too short to proofread.
Or because they, like most other buisnesses, will not post advertisements for events for free?
I worked behind the register at a gas station and our policy was no signs (I felt evil when I had to tell a woman that she could not post a sign asking for help finding her runaway daughter).
If you wanted to post something, you had to talk to the manager and lease the window space.
And the last LAN I went to resulted in me purchasing 3 new games that I got to try out there and that I liked.
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
Actually, I hosted one for four years on my college campus and since it was on campus, everyone was covered under the college's insurance, just like the spectators at a basketball game or football game.
"The object of war is not to die for your country, but to make the other bastard die for his." - Patton
If you happen to have one, and some l337 kiddie is demolishing you in that one-on-one deathmatch, a clever tactic is sending her over to gently blow in his ear.
I run a LAN party here in Australia every 6 weeks, I have a permanently setup venue, and charge AUD$20 for entry. We usually have 100-120 people come along, sometimes more, sometimes less, but the $20 entry fee covers costs quite adequately. It has taken a while to build to this level however, and having only one event a year would be like trying to start from scratch every time.
Usually we run a 24 hour event, although last week we had our 5th anniversary, so we did a 43 hour event instead for the same price. I find that if you have a good event, people are more than happy to pay the entry fee. Use some of it to pay for a decent door prize, I find that always encourages extra people to come along, as they have the idea that they might actually come out on top with a $100+ piece of computer hardware.
I also offer prizes for games etc. and have built up a good relationship with a few local businesses who let us put up flyers and posters, as well as donating prizes for us. We have sold t-shirts in the past, but the costs of getting them made up means you can't actually make much money on them, people don't actually want to spend as much for a LAN t-shirt as they would for a designer label.
As for insurance, I've now run 35 LANs without ever needing it, but it's that one time you do need it that it matters.
http://www.blamlan.com/
I'm guessing you've never held (or been to) a "rent party", the purpose of which is to charge enough for admission (and access to the kegs) to cover the residents' living expenses until the next party. (Those with good accounting skills also factor in the cost of the refreshments when calculating whether the party was a "success" or not, and those capable of long-term thinking factor in the loss of their security deposit at the end of the school term.)
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
In a place like Australia, you'd probably get away with a nice strong disclaimer and acceptance of risk by the individual punters. In a place like the US, as vexatiously litigous as you folks are, I'd probably not bother running the event at all, but certainly not without insurance at least!
Not likely, since sydney is The third most litigious city in the world.
Send lawyers, guns, and money!
We always had free tap water, coffee and tea. We charged for bottled water and used free wine to liqour up prospective art buyers. We could not sell it we had no licence.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
How about America's Army http://www.americasarmy.com/ I haven't played for a while, but it stands up to other games at the $50 price range while being a free download, for the full version.
Me and 5-6 friends hosted a monthly LAN Party that lasted 2-3 years (1997-1999) and had a peak attendance of 70 people. Over the event's lifetime, it actually broke even! Here's how we did it:
We started very small: just 8 of us in a guy's house. If we met someone that was a gamer, we invited him to the next month's event. After a few months, the host's wife got a little annoyed at the size of the event. So, we had to move...
We rented out a local Lion's Club for a reasonable price & had an 25 people at the first event. We charged everyone $15 to get in & asked everyone to bring some sort of snack or drink. We even taped heavy black plastic trash bags over the windows so nobody suffered from glare). It was a great success.
Next, we started a small website with a FAQ (adults only, no booze, no drugs, games we play, etc...), a map to where we hosted the event, and a message board to see what games people wanted to play. We also made it clear that we were a Quake2 Lan Party so that we attracted people who were all interested in the same game.
We actually planned out 80% of the event (1PM until 2AM) so that there was usually a scheduled activity right around the corner. Events included the following:
-Started with a few deathmatch servers that people could hop in & out of while configuring their computers. We used some mod that kept things "even" - the more frags you had, the less damage your weapon did (and vice versa)...it got the point where you'd have to rail some newbie 4 times to kill him, but a few shots from him with his pistol would kill you - very fun stuff & extremely even scores)
-A silly tournament of sorts (QPong, Chase the chicken, or the like). Always good for a laugh.
-A group tournament such as CTF, Team Rocket Arena, Ball & Chain (Strongest player teamed up with the weakest player - usually decided by parsing the logs of all the previous tourneys & the warmup servers)
-30 v 30 Rocket Arena (the absolute highlight of the evening - there's nothing like running around on a HUGE map with 15 of your teammates trying to kill all who stood before you. It was always fun if you were the last man on one team...the whole place would errupt in cheers if you actually killed one of the mob hunting for you).
-A 1 v 1 tournament. We usually gave out medals or trophies to the top 3 players (very cheap, but such a nice item to have - just for pride; I think I still have one above my computer). We actually attracted the top players in the Houston area to this event & had several top 50 GPL players show up on many occasions.
Most tournaments were double elimination & there were always a few deathmatch servers to retire to after you were bumped out of the tournament.
People had fun playing, but the real fun always happened near the food table: you got to meet the guy who kept fragging your ass & B.S. with him or brag with your friends about some kick-ass kill.
As we grew, we had to install a new sub-panel at the lion's club to handle all the computers (an organizing member was an electrician & just charged us for parts), we frequently borrowed a switch (one of the guys worked for a networking company & didn't mind us borrowing a high powered switch for the weekend) & we started providing food (we raised the admission to $20/person but provided lunch AND dinner plus more snacks than you could eat - I usually shopped the local sales or Sam's Wholesale club).
Towards the end, we were an official GPL (??) qualifing event, had real sponsors (for door prizes & tourney prizes): Bawls, Logitech, & a local porn shop (one of the players managed an adult video store - his door prizes were very interesting), and had the tiny Lion's Club rocking with 70+ people. We even had to turn people away.
Here are the things that I think made us successful:
1. Start small & grow into the event. This did several things: we never lost a lot
Why big games when a very small game can be fun too?
:) )
We played Turbo Sliders http://www.turbosliders.tk/ (free game) every time now at our lanparty.
Big advantage is (besides that it's just very cool) that it run's from almost any PC, so that means hardly no hassle in setting it up (extract & run & change nick & connect & play
An informative post responding to a post that noted that they got insightful modding when they tried to joke, gets modded funny?
Wow! Imagine the karma I'd get if I started to troll or, I dunno... post offtopic? O:)
a small venu with people that have Uber-gear, those games are great.
I used to host lan parties, and I found that having a bunch of games around for others to install and play is better.
BZFlag - absolute insane tank fun.
Parsec - still a beta but you can have a decent space combat going.
One of the open/free Quake and Quake II versions out there with different GFX and levels.
demo version of games that let you play. (UT2003 play's on lots of hardware that is old.)
RTcW is a great one.
there are GOBS of lan games that are free/open source. be sure to have them and be prepared for them.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
More recent games have better graphics, but I still like QuakeWorld (usually with either the Pain Keep or Team Fortress mods) for playability.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I used to help run The Stomping Grounds (the now defunct LAN center that was affiliated with Stomped, the gaming website). Before the owner closed the doors because of frustration with other aspects of running a dot-com business, the LAN center was doing quite well. We also followed the "provide everything" model, and supplemented our income by selling food and snacks at the center. You'll be amazed at how many people will gladly fork over a buck or two for a can of Red Bull or a Bawls if it means they don't have to go anywhere to get it, and can just run back to their machine and get back in before they respawn.
Head over to your local Costco or whatever and stock up on snacks at cheap prices. A modest markup may help you break even.
Here are the (gruesome) details
Normally I just attend public LAN Parties -- like at CyberLAN Atlanta -- but when it comes down to having one at my house or a friend's, it does take an awful long time to set up. Not to say that it's not worth it all though, but sometimes running Cat5 all across the house can be the most obnoxious thing you'll ever do. Once the dust has settled and you have everything set up though, you'll find out that the LAN party is probably one of the most fun things to do. So you just really have to think about if you're in the "give a lot, receive a lot more" mood, because when it comes down to it, LAN Parties are worth every single second it takes to set up. Rather you're blasting through friends in some Quake 3 or just sniping them in Rogue Spear, online computer games are what makes the world happy -- or me at least. So from time to time... I just have to sit back with a case of caffeine (rather that be BAWLs, Jolt, or something else) and frag the world away.
"Instant gratification takes too long." - Carrie Fisher
I am a lawyer,
No you're not. Or at least, if you are, you're a very bad one. I am not a lawyer, but even I know that the very first thing any real lawyer does when discussing legal issues in a non-professional context (such as Slashdot) is prefix their entire comment with a disclaimer stating to the effect of "the following is not legal advice and should not be taken as such."
Had you said you're a law student, I might have believed that, and assumed that you simply haven't gotten to the part about "professional legal accountability" yet.
Like woodworking? Build your own picture frames.
Simply make every participant sign a release of responsibility form.