Hasn't anyone told him that LAN parties are a thing of the past? You can't even fire up the new Diablo game without connecting through Battle.net... they're all WAN parties now, even if you're in the same room.

Rich guy lives in lavish luxury, news at 11!

The concept of LAN parties was a neat idea, but the execution always seems to be lacking. From previous events I attended:

The event was segmented into tiny groups playing only 1 game. If you were going play Quake 3 with the 2 friends you brought with, why didn't you just stay home?

The event was iron handed in that they only allowed a single game to be played by anyone. Yes, 8 hours of counterstrike sounds like an absolutely smashing good time

Piss poor organization. It shouldn't take half the event to plan a tournament ladder. There is software that will do this for you.

Piss poor network. I was at an event once at the MN state fair grounds with about 200 or so people. The organizers decided that with this many people, it would be ok to use a complete hub based network. No switches, only hubs. Have you ever experienced a 7 second latency? It makes tournaments awesome.

The attendees. I'm not advocating everyone where suits and ties to this sort of thing, but could you at the very least take a shower that morning and put something else on besides pajamas?

The logistics of patching. This is a difficult one to get by. If an event is significantly large enough, you can't have everyone hopping online (assuming there is even a net connection) to patch their software. Good organizers will have some sort of file server setup with the latest versions of the games they plan to run, and a good DNS structure that will let people get to those. i.e. Go to http://gamepatches to grab the latest patches. This is also assuming you are running vanilla games and not any mods.

Like I said, the concept is nice, but I've never seen one that didn't just make me frustrated. I prefer a small group of friends getting together and playing over a LAN or just jumping online together. At least that was the smell isn't as offensive.

wmoonfox: Hasn't anyone told him that LAN parties are a thing of the past? You can't even fire up the new Diablo game without connecting through Battle.net... they're all WAN parties now, even if you're in the same room.

Dont fark with it man. Let the geeks get out of their mothers basement for a few hours so they can change the sheets.

I'd say this is pretty awesome. I'd love having that set up at my place. Now, does he have any sort of system to kick out his nerd friends that get hooked into a 24hr marathon WoW session?

I will not be attending this douchbag 1%'er....hes an assh....

*reads

...I paid for mine by saving up money.......
....my house's value is on the low end for houses in the area....

*scratches chin.....

guy seems pretty cool.

HotDogDay82: Rich guy lives in lavish luxury, news at 11!

Read the article, moran.

Our LAN parties are more like binge eating and drinking parties. With gaming in the background. Gets the wives out of the house too.

It's not a party if people aren't each staring into individual screens and talking to each other through headsets.

bart2puck: guy seems pretty cool.

He may be cool, but he's full of crap. The square footage of his gaming room alone, given the average price per square foot in his neighborhood, is well beyond the ability of anyone reading this forum, and that's not taking into account the custom, non-standard build, materials, or perks. You probably could have built the place cheaper by constructing it entirely out of recycled $100 bills.

It's his money, and he can spend it any way he wishes without needing to justify it to anyone, but, if you are going to justify it, at least make an effort.

LOL @ all the lan party downing, but the last two I put on, both in the past year, all went quite well. There was a need for internet, but we used a single cell phone for it without trouble. Most games either have a functional dedicated server, or only use the internet for initial validation. That, and we used starfriend to bypass the need for battle.net in SCII, the one exception.

It was generally between 8 and 12 guys, so not really a large one, but plenty for a good time. We played TF2, Artemis (a blast!) l4d2, ET:Quake Wars, Killing Floor, Xwing vs Tie Fighter, SCII, and a bunch of other stuff.


My wife thought I was going to want to build a house after this... But honestly, I think I'd rather it be somewhere outside my house! :)

Pwnchubr: Our LAN parties are more like binge eating and drinking parties. With gaming in the background. Gets the wives out of the house too.


Do they play from the garage?

defiancecp: LOL @ all the lan party downing, but the last two I put on, both in the past year, all went quite well. There was a need for internet, but we used a single cell phone for it without trouble. Most games either have a functional dedicated server, or only use the internet for initial validation. That, and we used starfriend to bypass the need for battle.net in SCII, the one exception.

It was generally between 8 and 12 guys, so not really a large one, but plenty for a good time. We played TF2, Artemis (a blast!) l4d2, ET:Quake Wars, Killing Floor, Xwing vs Tie Fighter, SCII, and a bunch of other stuff.


My wife thought I was going to want to build a house after this... But honestly, I think I'd rather it be somewhere outside my house! :)

Cell phone? I call bullshiat! I tried gaming with only myself on a cell phone and the latency was awful. Thankfully have 20mb cable now.

ctrl+f: "wife" - no results. i'm not sure what i expected on that one.

fracto73: Pwnchubr: Our LAN parties are more like binge eating and drinking parties. With gaming in the background. Gets the wives out of the house too.


Do they play from the garage?

LOL! Not sure where they go, don't care either!

Pwnchubr: Cell phone? I call bullshiat! I tried gaming with only myself on a cell phone and the latency was awful. Thankfully have 20mb cable now.

He's talking about crap that just has to dial home, and has its own dedicated server.

We had some awesome LAN parties back in the day. Age of Empires II was the weapon of choice. 4 on 4, games lasting for hours. Every tree on the map stripped away, all minerals devoured. Walls everywhere. One person's entire unit cap made of Cataphracts storming around the map while fire ships and siege ships dominated the seas. War elephant corpses littered the plains. Trebuchets shattered like toothpicks. It was beautiful.

wmoonfox: bart2puck: guy seems pretty cool.

He may be cool, but he's full of crap. The square footage of his gaming room alone, given the average price per square foot in his neighborhood, is well beyond the ability of anyone reading this forum, and that's not taking into account the custom, non-standard build, materials, or perks. You probably could have built the place cheaper by constructing it entirely out of recycled $100 bills.

It's his money, and he can spend it any way he wishes without needing to justify it to anyone, but, if you are going to justify it, at least make an effort.

Right, and what are the other details of the house? A 1421 sq. ft. 1 bedroom house is a lot different than a 3 bedroom which would arguably need to be another ~250 sq. ft. which just furthers the impracticality of his "justification".

MightyPez: The concept of LAN parties was a neat idea, but the execution always seems to be lacking. From previous events I attended:

Won't quote the whole thing, but it looks like the guys hosting didn't know how to host.

We have had a couple of really cool parties recently. For patching, we have a few external drives with all the patches on them and you are good to go, pass them around if need be. We schedule games, yes, but not for 8 hours straight (unless that is what everyone wants). Generally we would have 2 games going at once (requires to dedicated servers, but not too big of a deal) for a few hours at stretch. To keep it interesting, we would do a tournament. If we do deathmatch, we can have some fun with it. One of the things that is a lot of fun are "scrambles" of a few different types: We would take a set of small, claustrophobic deathmatch maps and throw everyone in for only 5 minutes at a time. Gets the adrenaline going. We also did a computer scramble where we play a larger map but you change computers every 5 minutes or so. Makes it fun to try and adjust to everyone's layout.

Finally, breaks are a must. Put those in every x hours.

Hosting a LAN party this xmas - all patched and ready now, waiting for the first guest to arrive on the 18th; He's supplying the last switch needed to finish that segment, and I'm putting together his new computer (8150, 16GB DDR3, ATi 6970, Corsair F60, 2TB storage). Planning on having 6 desktops + handful of consoles and laptops.

We do this semi-annually, and it is a veritable orgy of gaming and piracy. Got the fileserver all ready to go with the latest patches for the games I'm expecting to be played, too.

I regularly host a LAN party on major holiday weekends. It's Bring Your Own Computer, so all I need is folding tables and chairs, a switch, some network cables, a large room, electricity, and internet access. I also provide soda, bottled water and snacks-but food is pizza or fast food (they pay) and if they want booze they have to bring it. Some people crash on the couch, others go home each night.

It's lots of (nerdy) fun. The main problem is getting everybody to play the same game; sometimes the thing breaks down into little groups of three people, or others go play single player games or watch movies.

Pwnchubr:

Cell phone? I call bullshiat! I tried gaming with only myself on a cell phone and the latency was awful. Thankfully have 20mb cable now.

Depends on the games. I used a Virgin Mobile hot spot (Sprint 3G) in my house for about 6 months. I had two laptops, a desktop, three consoles, and a portable gaming console all connected wireless. Granted only five devices could connect to the Internet at a time but that was cool since only the computers were connected 24/7. I had a 1 mb down and about .5 mb up and never had major problems playing online. Everything from FPS to MMOs. Two of us in the house are avid WoW players and we would both connect without problems. Despite needing a connection, you really don't need a fast one in order to play games online any more. My brother in law played Call of Duty and others on Xbox live and never had a problem either.

LAN parties are awesome by the way. We used to host them on campus while at college. Played TF2, Quake Live, Call of Duty, SC2, and other games and it was generally a good experience. We did have labs already set up so all we needed were the games downloaded to play.

We always had this consisent fact when it came to LAN parties. Someone's PC will ALWAYS brick on the drive over, without fail. I've had a tower sit on the backseat all the way over, secure and barely moved, got their, MB had failed.

Also, we kind of banned alcohol after the first few that we allowed it. Drinking parties are fun, lan parties ditto, but we never got them to work together. Once people start to get a buzz on they didn't want to game anymore, just BS on the patio.

Other problem was no one ever had the games patched or worse yet didn't have it installed period. First 2 hours was nothing more than a warez party.

I'm just happy to say that at the last LAN party I attended, I was glad I wasn't the one who invited the guy who screamed the N-bomb loud enough for the whole house to hear during one of the Halo rounds. The N-bombs in attendance were not exactly sporting about it.

Not sure if he ever came back for his controller.

bugmn99: I'm just happy to say that at the last LAN party I attended, I was glad I wasn't the one who invited the guy who screamed the N-bomb loud enough for the whole house to hear during one of the Halo rounds. The N-bombs in attendance were not exactly sporting about it.

Not sure if he ever came back for his controller.

Tell your N-bombs friends in attendance to lighten up. The ones at your our parties would yell back "F you honkey!", everyone would laugh, and we'd keep going.

What nerds might look like

unicron702: We always had this consisent fact when it came to LAN parties. Someone's PC will ALWAYS brick on the drive over, without fail. I've had a tower sit on the backseat all the way over, secure and barely moved, got their, MB had failed.

Also, we kind of banned alcohol after the first few that we allowed it. Drinking parties are fun, lan parties ditto, but we never got them to work together. Once people start to get a buzz on they didn't want to game anymore, just BS on the patio.

Other problem was no one ever had the games patched or worse yet didn't have it installed period. First 2 hours was nothing more than a warez party.

Funny you should say that; My spare system (P43­2 (one of the dual core spaceheater ones), 3GB DDR2, ATi 3870) just had its motherboard hurk it. I am somewhat pissed, since that was supposed to be the patchserver.

I remember the days when we had the old 16-bit ISA network cards on a BNC connection, running all the DOS games with a custom autoexec.bat file with all our menus and configs in them so we could synch all the start and stopnet commands. The best was when we had enough Thrustmaster joysticks to play deathmatch Descent.

Those parties were rough because you spend 1-2 hours just getting things set up, 30-60 minutes troubleshooting along the way.

That was all pre-marriage/pre-kids, btw. Once most of us got jobs/wives/offspring years later, the dynamic changed dramatically. The average 10-guy party would be like this:

2 guys who were single and had the newest gaming rigs because they had no ancillary expenses. They'd be late because they worked odd hours and had to have separate areas set up since they had a water-cooled pump or whatever noisy 400rpm fan was cooling their CPU. 1 of these guys usually had the newest game that he wanted to show off but no one else was able to play.

1 guy who brought his farking 11-year-old son because the wife wouldn't babysit, so we had to curtail all our profanity and adult topics, not to mention risk getting asskicked by an 11yo who had enough free time to master the game. It was funny because the kid obviously had to censor himself as well because god forbid dad would hear him go 'suck it down, biatch!" while he was fragging someone.

2 guys who did nothing but surf/trade prOn because they didn't have the privacy to do so at home. They weren't too bad because they usually had 3-4 good pirated versions of games they'd let us copy over to our systems to test out during down times.

1 guy who was constantly interrupted by calls from his wife because the baby was sick/crying/an easy excuse to make him pay attention to her. This would be his only night out with the guys in months, but he'd be there 2 hours and leave by the 3rd because he felt browbeaten into going home to take care of his co-dependent wife. I assure you the divorce 1 year later was entirely coincidental.

2 guys who ended up playing a game by themselves because everyone else was farking around and not gaming. These were the ones who would eat pizza but not chip in, drank Jolt all night and sat mesmerized, melded to their systems like freaking cyborgs. They must have been married to cool wives who didn't bug them on their night out or had turned their phones off.

1 guy who was the amateur chef who did nothing but cook and eat all night. Alcohol often coincided with this. Spent night at host's house to avoid DUI.

Gourmet chef guy rotated with GQ Mo-Fo Who We All Hated, a friend of the host in from out of town and got invited by default. We hated him because he was a ridiculously good looking nerd with a model-quality girlfriend, and they'd sit off in the corner making out and watching Star Wars all night long. He'd remind us of her Slave Leia costume and only let us imagine how she looked in it.

1 guy who did nothing but chat with his internet girlfriends while running an MMORPG in a window (one none of us were playing), and then complained later on that he was bored because we wouldn't game with him.

It became much easier later on to do a WAN party since you didn't have to deal with all the lingering sociological issues of getting a bunch of nerds together and expect them to, ya know, game.