Aftermath: LanOC v6.0

Thanks for coming out, I know we had a great time. Hopefully you did, too. v6.0 was one of our best LANs yet, but we are always looking to improve the experience.

What did you guys like? What wasn't so good? Suggestions, comments, etc, please we'd love to hear from you.

Also, remember to shoot some sort of thanks to the companies that support us, especially if you won a prize from them. We had our largest array of prizes to date, and we'd like to improve on that as well, and we NEED YOUR HELP! Facebook is a great way, just type in the company's name and become a fan to write a thank you on their wall.

Again, thanks for coming. Rest assured that v6.5 and v7.0 are already in the works, so stay tuned for updates. You can always find the latest conversation and reviews from our community as well.

Unfortunately I wasn't able to make it until the very last part of the LAN, but I was still able to hang out with good friends and win some awesome prizes. Looking forward to seeing everyone at 6.5, and you won't get off so easily fragging me when I can bring my rig!

The event was, as I've mentioned, the best yet.

Goods:

To adjust:

I think that covers most everything I noticed. I wish I had won some things to get started on my new rig, but maybe this controller is a sign that I should just stick to PS3...

I'm SO glad Adam (aka lost_variable) found your LAN party. We had such a great time! It was my first LAN party ever and I couldn't of asked for more. Everyone was so nice, and I'm glad I got to meet some of the people I've been talking smack to .

Before I get into the good and the bads.. I just want to give a special shout out to WES and WINGLESS (sorry for some reason I don't remember getting your first name). But the both of you made my group feel right at home. We really had a great time and I hope I'll be able to game with you more often.

ok the bad. which nothing was REALLY bad, I just really hope that your next LAN party will involve a little more FPS play, esp in the realm of COD4, MW2, and BFBC2. I know I'm a little bias, because these are the only games I play, but we had a fairly large group that were playing these games with us, and I guess I just would of liked to have a little more structured competition with my fave games.


the good. Even though I played no other games at the LAN (ok, well I tried "unreal" but I wouldn't even call that playing since I had no idea what was going on) I still had a great time, I was never bored... I got to come home with a piggy, (I had been eying those the entire time ) and I met a lot of cool people... not to mention TEAM STREET CREAM dominating in dodgeball I cant wait to get home from my deployment, because trust me I'll be back... (or maybe we can have a mini FPS LAN party before I leave )

Thanks so much for putting everything together, I can speak for my group and say we had a blast!!

Always a good time at LanOC. This was my first full-fledge Lan. The first was the mini-lan V5.5 and that was fun too. I was very excited to win the NVIDIA case...had my eye on that the whole time. (seeing as I am currently running the NVIDIA GTX 260) Now I can have a case and the graphics card to back it up. Also, I couldn't believe that I won the RAM!!!! I have terrible luck when it comes to raffles lol

Also, good job Daveyo and Scootpogo for the DoTA tourny!!! And for the UT2K tourny lol can't believe we were on the same team for both...and we did a dam good job I think

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!LANOC FTW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Tiff: I'm a huge FPS player, but since I wasn't there for most of this lan, I didn't bring my rig. I was the one who got the shirt in the raffle, haha. I'll be more than happy to frag you at the next LanOC event. I always try to keep games of FPS going if I can. In other news, awesome uniforms.

Adam: I became fans of the sponsors on Facebook and thanked them all, thanks for the heads up.

Also, yeah, the communication thing has always been one of our biggest issues: Finding games to play, and people to play them with. Yelling usually works, but hopefully we can get a unified, awesome system sooner or later. Maybe host a local Ventrilo server and people wanting to find games could idle in a certain channel, then create channels for the games being played? We'll figure out a good way to solve this issue one way or another.

Dreyvas wrote:

Adam: I became fans of the sponsors on Facebook and thanked them all, thanks for the heads up.

Sweet! I saw that several of you have, thanks to you guys. We can't stress enough how important your feedback to companies is to securing even more prizes for v7.0

Keep the feedback coming to us about the LAN, too. This is a place that we simply listen and don't reply much, so don't think no one is reading them.

Awesome time, wish I could have made it to day two (heard i won something...figures lol) Glad Starkiller and I got a crysis wars game going for a while. Hopefully there will be another one between me getting back from camp (working at a camp for three months this summer)and going back to school.

One thing that would help out alot is if someone is talking on the mic then its probably something u may want to know so please be quite and pay attention that will eliminate the chance of anyone not knowing something that is explained for there benefit. I noticed a couple times when things where being explained over the mic there where more people then should ahve been not taking there headset off or they were still talking and not paying attention, i understand it happens but still in order for any LAN to properly run more smooth, including tournys and such events, the staff needs everyones attention at specific points of the events to allow for less confusion.

Well I just got home from work, BLAHHHHH, I feel like poop, lol. I was called in, sometimes you ask for a day off and you just don't get it.

Anyways,

I had a great time. It's fun to see old friends and make new ones. I am glad that the "NEW" people had a great time. I know for me that the Unreal tourney was fun, even though we only went 1 round. That's the breaks.

Thanks for all that voted to smash my case, YOU BASTARDS!!!! lol.

I was kinda surprise that the new guy won the CPU. If you talked to him then you would of known that he was running an i3 so it'll be a nice step up for him.

About the communication thing, lets just rent a Ventrillo server for a month or a week. I am pretty sure that you can do it for a week, I know for sure that you can do it monthly. Just add it in to the cost of registration. Will make things alot eaiser. Hell, i'll even host and run the thing.

After some thought I am going to give my IcyDock kit away to my brother in law as a birthday present. I just don't have a need for it. I know it will be put to good use. He has a poop ton of HDD around.

Thanks for all the great times, the old friends, the new friends and people that are just NUTS!!!

STORAGGGGGGE!!!!!! lol, funny as hell man,


thee ah, golf ball uh ah, wacker guy.

Yeah, it was a good time, and thanks to everyone who helped in setting it up, as well as the folks who came out and helped make it a good time.

Thoughts:
Communication - I think a vent server for everyone to talk in might be a bit much and over-complicated. I'm sure lots of people use vent, but there's some that don't, not to mention if you're talking 50-80 people in a vent room.. doesn't sound like a winner imo.

A simple chat solution, ie IRC with staff as admins might be a could call. Although I'm sure most users don't have an IRC client either, so that's another issue. If you could find a seamless chat solution that runs via js or similar in browser that could be on the control panel page, that might work. I think something self-contained would be best for the easy factor and not wasting time with people coming up and asking 'How do I set this up'. Another idea is to add a projector in the viewable area of all users that could display a list of active server/games, perhaps a status (game being played/open slots/total players, etc) on 'official' servers.
>>Further on the projector, you could post important notes/announcements, etc., as opposed to just announcing them on mic when someone might not be paying attention, in the bathroom, outside, getting food, or just blasting their 'phones.

I think I would've liked to see more pre-defined play.. as in 'during these hours we'll officially be playing X game with at least 'X' official servers running said game.' This lets users know what games others will likely be playing (to purchase the necessary ones) prior to the LAN, and would likely lead to larger games (ie when we played TF2 server was maxed) - as opposed to having a bunch of 6-8 person groups playing counter-strike, crysis wars, codmw2, bfbc2, flatout, ut, etc.

The raffle and amount of prizes is nice, thanks to the sponsors, albeit dragged on a bit longer than necessary at the end.

Another idea might be taking a photo when you arrive, and posting it on a page that's part of the control center so people can easily associate a face with a name. For the UT tourney for instance, with randomized teams, it was kinda hard to coordinate because I didn't know who most of the folks were on my team, or what they looked like to track them down. Other times, it's nice to know who keeps pissing you off in a game so you can run over and smash their com.. make friends.

The randomized aspect of the team tourney was also good.

Weather was too nice.. made me wish I wasn't sitting inside at a LAN all weekend. Make it crappy!!

Blocking wow ports when Alex isn't looking is another good idea

Gig-E was without a doubt a winner, though. I'm sure a lot of people didn't give it a second thought, but the downloading of CrysisWars would've otherwise murdered the network.

Dodgeball is a nice break as well.

garfi3ld wrote:

The LCC had a way to communicate both food runs and games that are starting. I do wish I would have communicated it better, this is entirely my fault. The food run software even would include scheduled food runs right into the schedule (townie did set one up but noone took advantage).

Also, some of the features on the LCC didn't seem to work quite right - the games that were starting you couldn't modify or remove a posting afterwords, include a time if you were starting a later time, etc.

On communication, I think just some tweaks to the LCC would work. Vent would cause more network usage (we had enough issue getting our porn torrents to work lol), so I think the LCC or borgchat would be good. Not everyone has mics or headphones, so voice chat can be limiting. If we could get the LCC updated some, to allow for more games, and show the schedule/game requests/shoutbox more prevalently, then I think that would be a good enough all-around communication that everyone can access with simply a browser. Start firefox, leave it on the LCC in the background, and alt-tab when you want to check it, and then we have a decent unified communication system. A live chat room on the right side of the page or something would be awesome, but that may take some work.

Also, to Tiff: You have never played UT before, while you are an FPS fan? You should really try it out more. The guns and maps aren't realistic (hence "Unreal") but it is very fast and fun. Point click pwn. And we didn't even touch vehicles or mods. Play around with it, I think you will enjoy it. And glad that you felt at home, I did notice that the Lan seemed more inviting this time.

Some other things I realized last night: Drag-and-drop was awesome (as if it had to be said)! But flatout had a dup zip file in it, I wondered if that was needed or just a mistake. Also, did music work for anyone else in flatout 2?
Lastly, is the guy that won the i7 considering selling his i3?

You guys are very right in saying Vent might not be realistic in such a large setting. I'm just trying to throw out some new ideas, we've talked about projectors, IRC, Borgchat, etc. all in the past. Personally, I probably like IRC or Borgchat the most, but again, the only problem is getting people to actively check it. We need something that's kind of in-your-face, otherwise people just forget to check it/don't pay attention.

They gave away an i7? That's awesome. Can't wait to see all the pictures and prize list to i can feel even sadder about not being able to make it! You better believe i'll be at v7.0!

Off topic - Until then, where/when is the next LAN? There were several back to back in the fall (NeXus, Stompfest, LAN OC) but what's the plan for the summer? Are we going to try to find a bigger LAN (100+) and get a group to do like stompfest? Keep us posted on what you find out!

If so, I'm in..

White board?
Ticker board?

Hot scantily clad women carrying signs? ( think boxing or mma rings)

Leonresevil2 wrote:

Also, to Tiff: You have never played UT before, while you are an FPS fan? You should really try it out more. The guns and maps aren't realistic (hence "Unreal") but it is very fast and fun. Point click pwn. And we didn't even touch vehicles or mods. Play around with it, I think you will enjoy it. And glad that you felt at home, I did notice that the Lan seemed more inviting this time.

Well I just started gaming with COD4 it was my first game ever...I think the reason I didn't like it was because it was literary UNREAL lol I like the more realistic games... but it was still fun to try, but I doubt I'll ever play it again. lol


AND I REALLY THINK LANOC SHOULD HAVE A MINI LAN FOR FPS (the bigger games) BEFORE JULY... please and thank you

Tiffany wrote:

Well I just started gaming with COD4 it was my first game ever...I think the reason I didn't like it was because it was literary UNREAL lol I like the more realistic games... but it was still fun to try, but I doubt I'll ever play it again. lol


AND I REALLY THINK LANOC SHOULD HAVE A MINI LAN FOR FPS (the bigger games) BEFORE JULY... please and thank you

Well, it's good to see some girl gamers joining in. And everyone has individual tastes, and tastes evolve with time. Just don't be afraid to try something new.

As for July, LanOC usually does have mini-lans between, and summer is when more people are free. I'd be up for it around that time. Towards the end of May could be good, as more people would be back around from college and such. Maybe post up a topic listing what games and things you would like to see?

And for communication aspects, projectors or boards would be kinda nice. A board may have to be huge to be seen from all seats, otherwise people will be getting up and around pretty often. Maybe for a minilan. I've seen projectors work, but chances are that half of the people there won't be looking directly at it, so you may need 2, idk. IRC or something like it would be fine too. And yes, it needs to be 'in your face' otherwise people don't look often enough. My thought was, the internet browser on your screen is available everywhere and pretty in your face, and everyone uses and has a browser so it's not something you have to learn or go out of your way to use.

Americas Army? Ive never made it past the tutorial/training ( got bored ) but it sounds fun. and realistic

Tiffany wrote:

Leonresevil2 wrote:

Also, to Tiff: You have never played UT before, while you are an FPS fan? You should really try it out more. The guns and maps aren't realistic (hence "Unreal") but it is very fast and fun. Point click pwn. And we didn't even touch vehicles or mods. Play around with it, I think you will enjoy it. And glad that you felt at home, I did notice that the Lan seemed more inviting this time.

Well I just started gaming with COD4 it was my first game ever...I think the reason I didn't like it was because it was literary UNREAL lol I like the more realistic games... but it was still fun to try, but I doubt I'll ever play it again. lol


AND I REALLY THINK LANOC SHOULD HAVE A MINI LAN FOR FPS (the bigger games) BEFORE JULY... please and thank you

..you think Modern Warfare 2 is more realistic than Call of Duty 4? How long did you play Cod4, 5 minutes? Lol

garfi3ld wrote:

I think she was talking about unreal

yeah i was talking about unreal.. lol i LOVE COD4 my first game ever (my first love) lol but MW2 offers a lot more... I got bored with COD4 I leveled up in everything so quickly... MW2 is a lot harder to lvl up so it makes it more interesting.

Leonresevil2 wrote:

As for July, LanOC usually does have mini-lans between, and summer is when more people are free. I'd be up for it around that time. Towards the end of May could be good, as more people would be back around from college and such. Maybe post up a topic listing what games and things you would like to see?

I really hope we can make this work. I leave July 6th so a nice FPS tourney would be amazing .

and of course there I'd like to see

COD4
MW2
and
BFBC2

Clan Tourneys
Random Tourneys

whatever we can make up

Tiffany wrote:

garfi3ld wrote:

I think she was talking about unreal

yeah i was talking about unreal.. lol i LOVE COD4 my first game ever (my first love) lol but MW2 offers a lot more... I got bored with COD4 I leveled up in everything so quickly... MW2 is a lot harder to lvl up so it makes it more interesting.

Oh, I gotcha. The wording threw me off. Yeah, if Cod4 had prestige, I'd probably still be playing. It's an amazing game, but there isn't a lot of depth to it.

Hey all,

I was the one who won the i7 at the LAN and cannot wait to swap out my old CPU for this new one. THANKS LANOC!!! Our TSC (Team Red Shirts) team had a blast and cannot wait to come to the next one. With our group being the new people there we were a little worried that we would be outcasted but that was the complete opposite. Everyone was extremely nice and helpful with any problems that we had. When Dr. Wigglechin had a problem with his rig their were several people helping him out and Wingless let him use his CD to try to restore his machine.

The only thing that I would like to have seen was a central vent channel so everyone could see who was playing what and join accordingly. Since TSC plays basketball regularly we recommend the next outside activity to be basketball

Thanks again and we will be back to show our dominance


-lost_variable

lost_variable wrote:

Thanks again and we will be back to show Tiffany's dominance

no worries I fixed it for you