NeXus LAN 24 was fantastic!!! We will miss seeing everyone, but hope to see some of you at other LAN's down the line. Thank you everyone for years of support and fun!!!!
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FYI we did the math on those tables, just not feasible. I don't recall the exact number, but it was around $2,500 just for the tables. Then it's finding storage for and finding a way to haul around an additional 40-50 tables.
The LAN already owns most of the tables we use for the rows with the long white tables.
To purchase/store/haul would be a huge investment.
In general, most of us would agree that it would be optimal, just not doable.
FYI, we generally have tons of bandwidth available. When I ran the network two LANs ago we had 150MB/s and the only issues we had were due to some jackasses torrenting. It wasn't the bandwidth they were using, but how hard they were saturating the network. Once we figured that out and blocked them the network ran great. Would have been figured out waaaaaaaaaaay faster with Sideout there, but I was kind of thrown in to the fire.
Last LAN it was all Time Warner. There's a post about the issues we hit since everyone tends to get uppity about network and slings crap around. We can appreciate being frustrated about network issues, but last LAN was entirely out of our control.
Surprised they didn't do gamehaven Chris' corn dogs last time, seems like meat on a stick would sell well and are stupid easy to make.
Maybe something like dirt pudding, something they could premake in cups. I don't recall them ever trying something sweet.
I personally think they should try something gimmicky like rippers (deep fried hot dogs), novelty sells and it'd be easy to pull off. Could even come up with a signature LAN dog or something.
Think of the possibilities: The LAN dog. Featuring a deep fried hot dog with sriracha, saurkraut, hot peppers in a seeded toasted bun with a single rolaid on the side.
Teams should be random, otherwise it will just punish honest people and reward the not so honest. These tournaments are supposed to be just for fun anyways.
That's exactly it
The key thing is, we're not professionals and people make mistakes or overlook things. We're just a group of friends that hang out and game several weekends a month. Generally all decisions regarding the LAN are in that spirit. We just want to hang out with our friends and have fun. That being said, we take tournaments very seriously and are already taking corrective actions. That being said, there will always be teams that are better than other teams. Everyone has the right to play in a tourney at our event and it's something we encourage no matter the skill level, we're not elitists and we don't want to be those guys. On the other hand, we do allow our sponsors to sign up to sponsor specific tournaments which allows for some pretty decent prizes for tourneys, and we want things to be as fair as they can be. Even with the option for slightly better skill sorting, there will still be a random element to it.
Beyond that, most of the issues stem from myself having to shift to a different demanding role. I had been pretty anal about tournaments and like to think they had been progressively getting better, however, we lost our network admin for this LAN (sideout) and we needed someone for that role. Four or five years ago when we were at 80 or so people, our configs were pretty basic. Now that we're basically at 170 and growing, it's a completely different world and setup as a high performance enterprise LAN minus an army of managed switches. I have some enterprise networking experience, but it was still a trial by fire. I had spent an entire mini-lan (11am-1am) two weeks before the LAN figuring things out, and the day before the LAN (7 hours) at Renegades store figuring things out. No amount of preparation will get you ready to manage the number of hosts and data we had pushing through the network of someone else's design. It's sideouts baby, I was just the babysitter. I had to call mom a few times, or at least FB chat with mom.
That said I figured it out, and outside of one really dumb configuration issue we had with CS:GO (we've ran the same config for years, but for some reason only had an issue during this LAN), I generally figured out a system to monitor metrics and deny network access to those that feel P2P file sharing with the web is acceptable at a LAN. The first round of HoTs for example, we had one guy pushing 20-40k packets per second and eating a significant portion of bandwidth. We do have limiters enabled, but it was likely the sheer number of packets that were causing an issue.
You must not have played it.. gave it too much credit
If it had the depth of battlefield, it'd be awesome.
It's like battlefield-lite. There isn't much depth.. or roles. It's good at being a game you can jump in and play quickly to kill some time. It's bad at having any real depth.
It's OK, but seems kind of light for $60. Having to pay for a Starwars License might do that though. I guess I expected a little more.
With that said, Green Man burned me on 2 of my 3 last purchases from them.
1) When I bought GTA 5 I'm 99% certain it said it required Steam as a DRM (important for me) and instead I got a rockstar key. 2) I ordered Starwars Battlefront a while ago and the delayed keys caused me to cancel the order and buy direct from Origin
I won't pre-order through them again. If they have a cheap key in stock, might be a different story.
Social media goes a looooooooooooooong way with us since we're still kind of new in the gaming market.
We've only been in gaming for two years or so, but we're a pretty massive company that has doing performance computing/servers for over 20 years. We do some pretty crazy stuff such as board-based overclocking for server products for algorithmic trading markets, massive storage servers (90 bay 3.5" 4U JBOD .. and other stuff based on that coming soon), and high density, small form factor servers. Among pretty much everything else. It was a year ago, but I believe we're the primary hardware vendor for 4 of the 5 top datacenters in the US.
My point is, we're looking at gaming coming from the server perspective which has very specific requirements in terms of PCB traces, component selection, testing and qualifications, and all sorts of other crazy stuff I didn't even know existed--and can't recall from my conversation with our Product Manager. I've been in the computing business 10 years, most of that in some sort of design role, and I didn't even know most of this stuff.
If we get pretty good social media feedback/support it's likely they'll increase what I'm able to do.
I gave away a fully integrated PC (minus a video card) a few weeks ago in Sacremento, this isn't outside of the realm of possibility for something like NeXus with the proper support.