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Throwing a LAN Party...
EliteLamer
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I have ran into a ton of people in this town that have been dying for a LAN party and I think I have the perfect place for that. As I have a 61 inch TV to play console games on a neo geo MVS arcade machine and everyone room in the place has an network jack alone with fiber optics and Cox cable internet connection. So how do I go about promoting this Lan party? I was thinking about making a listing on Lanparty.com or will that make my party so huge it wont fit into the house.
SEGA
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I would say talk to the people you already know who want to do a LAN party. Start small, and see how it goes.
Are you planning on doing a "bring your own everything" type of LAN party with no competitions or set schedule, or something a bit more organized with a cost for everyone and pizza and soda will be had or something?
Are you speaking of your own home or an office building? I would talk with your insurance company about possible legal issues if someone were to break something.
If it's in a house, it is absolutely vital that you make a power map.
Try getting a group together of people you know and trust for your first few of LAN parties until you can work out the kinks. While it's cool to meet new people and have new gamers to play against, it's not cool when you turn around and your server or someone's laptop or your 360 is gone.
Also make sure everyone knows which PC games you'll be playing ahead of time so they can have them installed, patched, and configured on their machines, and can maybe give you suggestions as to which maps or mods you should run on your server.
Also, having everyone pitch in a set cash amount usually works out better than bring whatever. If you start out with ten people at ten bucks a piece, that's $100 you can use to buy a few 24 packs of soda and order a bunch of pizzas. Anything left over should be put toward your power bill and cleanup costs.
It's better for console games if you can get people to bring their own controllers, especially if there will be food there.
Also, if you get one of those huge cheap whiteboards and some dry-erase markers it's really easy to keep a running score after each match.
LAN/Gaming parties are fun as fuck. Make sure to take pictures and post them afterward.
Steam / Bus Blog / Goozex Referral
Anything running XP or newer should be easy to get to see each other on the network for some LAN games. Shouldn't have to worry about anything for that.
I would talk to your friends and find out what games they want to play and then compile a list of different tournaments or games to play and poll them to find out who can run them. If a majority of the people can't run it, don't do a big tournament with it. Though you could still host a server for those who do want to run it.
Reminds me of a LAN party I went to at a fire hall. A few people didn't follow the instructions for power plugs and plugged too many computers into the same breaker and sent the whole place into darkness. The best part, the 5 or so of us (of 30-35) running UPS units lit the room enough for the guys running it to find the power room door and flip the breakers back.
Theoretically, yes.
I think with a few too many people connected you would start to have some bandwidth issues though. Unless you got a serious router designed for that.
Well, that and most people don't have wireless cards in their gaming desktops.
Starcraft is always popular at LAN parties where low spec machines will be present. It's cheap as hell too. Alliances in the game can level the playing field a bit for people with varying skill levels. Also, if you don't feel comfortable networking the machines, you can just have a passworded game on battle.net for the people at your party only.
You can always play Quake II or Quake III, both of which are cheap as hell and have a ton of mods to mix things up if you don't want to go vanilla. Q2 DM is fun as hell for us nostalgic gamers, and Q3 was designed for multiplayer. Q2 has a pretty fun class-based WWII mod called D-Day: Normandy, which is practically dead, but is fun as hell and is free. It's also standalone, so you don't need to own Quake II to play it. D-Day is a lot of fun to play at a LAN party as long as you have a large group of people playing. You need ten to twelve people minimum to make it fun on some of the larger maps.
There are always the classic Half-Life games, too. That, and Doom. You can play DM with the shareware, and stuff like ZDoom make it really easy to get a networked game going.
Also, if you are running a tourny, remember to have something else running for people who get knocked out so they can have something to do until the next round starts.
Some LAN parties make everyone use headphones, which saves space and reduces the power usage and amount of outlets required, but at the same time it's pretty cool when people have music and sound effects coming from all over. I like it when the place sounds like an arcade.
Steam / Bus Blog / Goozex Referral
First step, wherever you are hosting the party, you must know where every circuit breaker is and then you need to know which breaker every single outlet is on that you plan on using. Power is going to be your biggest problem. Find out just how much power each circuit can support and assume that each person's setup will use about 4-5 amps if they have a CRT or 2-3 if they bring an LCD.
Second step, set up the house rules. No CRT monitors bigger than 17" is a big rule of mine. LCD monitors are ok, but for CRTs it's rude to everyone else there since they not only take up way too much table space, they consume too much power. Another house rule is that everyone must bring headphones and a microphone. The microphone can be optionial, but no speakers. Make sure you have plenty of extra power strips and network cables and label every single piece of equipment that if yours. I like to have tags ready for people that bring their own power strips or network cables so that nobody gets their stuff mixed up at the end when it's time to clean up.
For our LAN party, we had our own voicechat server set up and a client that everyone could download. Since you said everyone would have internet you possibly won't have that problem as you can just use a Teamspeak/Ventrilo server. Make sure you make available a gamelist and have a fileserver with all the current patches people will need to be able to play together.
Our gamelist for our LAN was pretty modest, since we wanted games that everyone could run. We had Counter Strike 1.6, Warcraft III (Defense of the Ancients), and Battlefield 2. For Counter-Strike and Battlefield 2 we had our own dedicated servers that I set up before the event. For the console we had Fight Night, Smash Brothers, Madden, Guitar Hero, and Soul Calibur.
Basically when people came in, we charged a small entry fee to cover costs and we would write down the person's name and assign them a number and an IP address (the numbers were for things like random picks in tournaments, etc). Once someone has their computer set up, make sure you have helpers who can change their IP settings for the less technically-inclined.
After that you can either assign a schedule for gaming or do what we did and have sort of a loose structure where games just kind of happened on their own. We would join the CS or Battlefield servers and just sort of form up games, or get teams together for DotA. Since we were all pretty much old friends we just played for fun (no prizes or tournaments) and had a good time for three days.
Give everyone as advanced notice as possible so people can make themselves available and take time off work or school. I'd suggest a minimum of two months, but we planned ours six months in advance with a reminder going out every month just in case.
In the end we had our share of power and networking problems, but in the end it worked out and we all had fun, even if hosting the thing was a bigger headache then I ever imagined. I definitely have a lot more respect for the people that host LAN parties after that. A lot of work, time, and effort goes into getting it all right.
Last but not least, you may want to consider getting a domain and putting up a website with a list of all the times, dates, games, patches, notices, contacts, etc. This will greatly simplify things for you. Then you might want to print off some fliers to give to people you want to invite with the same info and a link to the website.
Ayliana Moonwhisper Ecksus Cerazal
Tremulous is a good choice as well, it's a free open source shooter with low requirements.
Starcraft is a must for LAN parties if you guys are into the RTS genre.
And definitely start out small and go bigger later. The more experience you have running Lan parties, the better.
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