NeXus LAN 15 tournaments announcement.....

[Renegade]

Here is the official list of tournaments for NeXus LAN 15

Call of Duty 4 5v5 - Saturday 2pm -

Counter Strike Global Offensive 5v5 - Saturday 8pm - Sponsored by Plantronics

Magic the Gathering CCG Standard Format Tournament - Saturday night after Raffle - Sponsored by P3 Computers

League of Legends 5v5  - Sunday 10am - Sponsored by Gamdias

Unreal Tournament 2k4 Deathmatch - Sunday 2pm - Sponsored by Be Quiet!


Info, modes, maps etc will be posted closer to the event.

[Z3PP]

Just wanted to voice my opinion in being a little disappointed with the tournaments.

First, voting was almost moot considering CS and League were on the list. Anyone could tell you those two would win, no matter the other games on the list. Not that I'm totally opposed to these games, just why the vote?

Second, why were the staff picks two more fps games? I understand ut2k4 but COD really surprised me. I was hoping the staff pick would introduce a little more variety. I've had excellent experiences with LAN's staff picks introducing fun games that people might not know about (worms, teeworlds, trackmania, bomberman, tribes, towerfall, etc)

Third, I thought there have more tournaments in the past, did Nexus LAN shave a few off for 15? Four video game tournaments for a 31 hour LAN seems pretty sparse.

I'm coming with ~8 people and I know some of them feel the same way. I just wanted to let you guys know how we were feeling.

-z3pp

[Jabbernaut]

I agree that taking a vote for the top 2 when there were 2 such obvious frontrunners was a bit redundant.

NeXus has a lot of experience running LANs and I think a lot of people underestimate how long tournaments run at LAN parties, especially ones of this scale. With the tournaments running back-to-back and not concurrently, I can see 4 tourneys being a comfortable number for them to do.  While it would probably be possible to do 5, with 3 tourneys on day 1, I think they just wanted to avoid some of the stress of running a tighter schedule.

However, Renegade has mentioned here that unofficial tournaments are welcome and encouraged, so if anyone would like to take it upon themselves to host a Hearthstone or other game tournament, NeXus will accomodate however they can.

Personally I think it would have been nice to see Hearthstone make the cut to break up the FPS monotony, but I understand there are a lot of FPS fans at these LANs.

[Renegade]

We have always run 4 PC tournaments 2 each day.

NL 14 was COD 4, CSGO, League, and Hearthstone.   There was a Magic tournament as well.   We planned a Mario Kart 8 but that didn't happen due to some timing issues.    

We have always been 4 main tournaments 2 each day ever since we went to the 2 day format.  

So your saying we should not bother to let people vote?   We can't control how people vote for what they want to play.    We would love to NOT run the same games from LAN to LAN but with how limited LAN games are anymore, and how popular certain others are it's very hard not to.    We have to put on the voting list what people ask us to include on the list.   And honestly we took the top 4 this time in the voting.  So really there was no staff picks this time it was all community voting.  

This group has become very popular with LoL and CSGO.   I see the same things happening at other LAN's.   LAN OC LoL always gets voted in, and either CSGO, or TF2 always wins as well.   They also have been seeing Hearthstone wining the vote last couple of times also.    

Top 4 voted games were -

CS GO - 47
league of Legends - 35
UT 2k4 - 28
COD 4 -26

We have in the past tried to put in odd things etc and the biggest issue is that we get very little participation in those off the wall dif games etc.    The FPS's and LoL all get 40+ people playing in them.   Where like Hearthstone last time had 24, Dirt Showdown only had at NL 13 like 13 or so.    Its really hard to put in games that we don't see at least 30+ signing up to play an honestly I would prefer it be games that we see 40+ signing up to play in them.    When you have a smaller LAN you can go with some of the smaller not played alot games, but when you are over at 145 people we have to go with that is popular.

I really wish there was a flood of new games all the time changing the scene but in the last few years that just is not happening.    Devs make games that are inet only, no local servers, and in most cases anymore no rentable servers or they make the rentable ones not able to be locked down for tournament play etc.

I see your point, and if there was another way to do things we would.   We look at this every event, and we have to let people voice opinions on what they want to see played and it would not really be fair to say well X won last time so it can't be on the list next time.

Also attendee's are more then welcome to run un-official tournaments with help from the staff on timing, using mic etc.      

[Jabbernaut]

It certainly would have been worth mentioning that our top *4* picks would wind up being selected and not the top 2, as I know a number of people that would have voted for Hearthstone that I didn't bother referring to the poll since I had assumed it was pointless and there was no way HS was going to beat out League and GO for either of the top 2 spots, I figured we'd just cross our fingers that it would wind up as a staff pick. It's a little late now to be revealing this information.

Basically, voting itself makes sense, but if only the top 2 voted games count and League and GO are on the list, there's not much point to taking a vote besides as a formality. It's not at all unusual for LANs to decide tournaments without a poll when the games people want to play are so obvious.  For the voting to be meaningful, it would need to extend to the top 3 or 4 picks, which no one was informed that it would, so I don't think anyone really took it seriously.

[Renegade]

It was not the plan to take top 4 but after voting that is what the admins did this time around.   They were looking for at least 1 item that was not played at the last event, and 1 other team event.   Hence the COD 4 and UT.  

As for top 2, we have only seen csgo win the last 2 time.   LoL is just too popular an wins all the time.    Usually of late its LoL and something else.  BF4 won not long ago, TF2 as well was played etc.   So saying we knew it would be csgo is not accurate as we didn't know how voting would go.

As it is this time around it just made sense that the top 4 were picked.    The 4th slot was between HS and UT2k4.   UT 2k4 was picked so that not ALL tournaments would be exactly the same from 14-15.

We also look at participation from previous events when picking tournaments we wanna see something that will hopefully have at least 30 if not 40+ people playing in the game.

Sadly we can not make everyone happy on tournaments, or voting etc.    Sure we could pick them all with no input etc like some other LAN's but we as a staff think that is way worse then putting up a vote like we do.

[Renegade]

Also EVERYONE should vote.  This is why we give everyone 6 votes so that the staff can look at what people are voting on past the top 2 and include those titles in our thought process.  This does not guarantee we will pick the 3/4th voted title but we do consider the other top voted games.

In this case 3/4/5/6/7/8 were COD 4, UT, BF4, HS, TF2, Freezetag.   

We dropped BF4 as it was in consideration as we could not find US Chicago/NY hosts that offered BF4 private servers.  They only offer ranked and I called an was told ranked cant have a PW on them to lock down for tournament play anymore.

So the picks ended up being what they are, we looked at past # of players in a title etc.   This time it just ended up being that the top 4 voted games were also the ones being played.

So what I am saying is never assume anything in voting.  Always vote, get friends coming to vote etc.   It takes 2 minutes to vote.  There is no reason not to voice your thoughts.

[Renegade]

We get the feeling that the people posting are not really upset at the picks, but were wanting Hearthstone in the picks.

If this is the case and anyone wants to run an un-official HS tournament we will provide a prize for your to give the winner and you can use the white board for brackets.    Have people sign up, make brackets and have them play their games over the 2 days to determine the winner.

If anyone wants to do this please PM me.

[Creel]

I agree with what they are doing.  The tourneys are more fun with having a large number of people in them.  If others did not take the time to vote too bad NL had sent out comms about the voting.

[sooth]

I feel what you're saying Jabbernaut but look at the vote breakdown.

There are supposedly 145 votes to be cast and only 35 of them landed on LoL. That means only 25% of the group voted for it.

To be quite honest I'm amazed. Herding gamers is like herding cats, getting them to do anything is a huge struggle. The fact that 25% of the group agreed on that game blows my mind. I'm quite curious to see what percentage of A) attendees actually voted and B) attendees that used all 6 votes.

If you want something different, my group is running/sponsoring a MW2 tourny: http://www.nexuslan.org/forums/index.php?topic=2469.0