After a brief delay, the early bird raffle started and we got to see all the amazing stuff that the sponsors sent. With all of the stuff in the tables up front, it seemed as if the tables were beginning to bow. The sponsors are always amazing to LanOC, but this time they really outdid themselves. Every single gamer (who was present when their name was called) won a prize and received a swag bag. There was even stuff left over at the end to keep handing out. Of course the biggest prize, a brand new GTX 660 video card was given away first, and not only did Wes not choose my name, he chose the person I rode with. This was particularly awesome because I got to hear about 500 times how he won a video card and he continually asked me if I won one too. RAAAAAAAAAAAGE.

For the rest of the evening staff continued to struggle with the network and get things back on track. There were some inevitable delays in tournaments and some obviously frustrated gamers, but the cure for that was simple. NBA Jam. A record 60 something people signed up for the old school tournament. Maybe it was because the network was having issues, or maybe it was because they heard I was playing and wanted a shot at me, but regardless it was amazing.  The first round was incredibly fun with a large crowd of onlookers and many oohs and aahs following the incredible action on the glorious 16 bit graphics of the Super Nintendo.

Towards the end of the first night Renegade discovered that a large part of our network issue was due to packet loss. The loss rate was abnormally high, and the reason for it was outside of the internal network, it was an issue on the part of Time Warner. Depending on where the packets were coming from and heading, pings were insanely high as well as high rates of packet loss. With all of the issues we had, and all of the stress that it caused, it is vital to note that Sideout was awesome and worked incredibly hard through the night to the best of his abilities to get the network working properly.