By Jim Rossignol on September 15th, 2010 at 9:49 am.
Are any of you lot LAN attendees? You know, when you use shorter tubes than the ones the internet is made of to link your PCs? That’s a question we would rather like an answer to. Please formalise your response to this excellent query via the polling system below.
[poll id="8"]
[poll id="9"]
Thanks!
No, small house-party type things.
Yes, I may attend an RPS-LAN, depending on timing, pricing and location.
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+1 on both sentences :)
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Oo if RPS is doing a LAN gaming event and its at a sutible month and at a sutible place i wouldn’t mind going to it. And totally get beaten by you lot.
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Went to early i series events as a normal peon, then got on as part of the staff, not been to any recently but the majority of my working day takes place in rooms designed for allowing lan play, if that counts?
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Yes and No, but I might be attending Dreamhack this winter though! Not much reason not to, since it’s pretty close to where I live :)
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Third (or whatever number this thread is up to now)-ed. Especially if it’s around London or Reading.
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Incidently, when are you next in Reading for a LAN party round mine again?
(I know there are many better ways to ask you this but hey :P)
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Thingus and Skiddings have the best LAN parties. If you don’t believe me, go up to a policeman in Reading and ask him where to find Thingus and Skiddings.
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Lanparty in Reading? If your accepting any extra people then count me in! I’m not some crazy person, its just gamer base is lacking in PC players right now.
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Me and a mate did i36 and i37 last year. Great way to spend a weekeng, inspite of the COD/CS player, who acted more like football hooligans than actual people after a few beers.
A more sedate affair with RPS types could be very interesting though, assuming some StarCraft 2 or L4D would be on the menu.
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I answered no, but the house I lived at during school almost qualified as an event, and there was certainly a LAN. My cable was second shortest, if you know what I’m talking about.
I also thought of gaming centers, or net cafes or whatever you limeys call them. Are you going to have people over to play?
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I don’t, at all, but I’m certainly intrigued.
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I used to attend the i-series regularly (i6 to i30 something), but it’s gotten too big/corporate for me. I tend to hold smaller LANs with with friends now, a group of 6-12 people every few months.
Generally more fun when you’ve got a good group of people all playing the same thing.
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Been to several with friends, but no big events.
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Sleep is Death/Solinium Infernum/Sims with only Kieron Gillen LAN party?
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@misterk – of course, as well as the sims it’s possible to play sleep is death with only KG characters too. A frightening thought.
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I regularly go to an all-weekend 14-to-20 person LAN with my friends, arranged four times a year (over ten years in the running, now). We have a kitchen, sauna and lots of bedrooms. I have no interest whatsoever in impersonal large-scale events.
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“We have a kitchen, sauna and lots of bedrooms.”
I think you’re confusing LAN with orgy.
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I am guessing that Jarmo is a Finnish name where I’ve heard that saunas are the national passtime (whilst beating yourself down with twigs?).
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Yeas, I have attended to 3 Lan events here in spain, including the biggest of the northwest, still, nothing comparable to quakecon
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Only the smaller (10ish) ones with people I actually know. That’s perfect to me really.
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I only use Hamachi, so technically, my OS is in a LAN, but I can still stay away from other humans.
Actually, I know very few gamers in real life, so I wouldn’t have anyone to LAN with.
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Snap!
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I didn’t really know any gamers in real life until I went to a LAN for the first time. It all starts with becoming a regular on your favourite game server, then registering to their forum and becoming steam friends with the other regulars…
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Yep, been to many, but just with friends and random friends of friends that get roped into it.
Of course, GameRanger has been a much easier solution for us, but sadly lacks the pizza and beer.
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Me and a couple of friends used to sit in a friend’s garage and throw popcorn at each other. In between the popcorn we’d play strategy games and the occasional FPS.
Went to Dreamhack once but it wasn’t as much fun as the garage.
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Ditto this, our garage was the only place with enough power strips / outlets to get together half a dozen PC setups on make-shift tables made from work benches, garbage cans, milk crates, and spare car parts.
We played lots of counter strike, star craft, diablo II, quake, and unreal tournament. Half the time I would have to steal network cards from work for the weekend because most of our PC’s at the time lacked them.
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I’ve been to a few bunch-of-friends affairs. I generally get stuck wrangling the router and rappelling down the side of the house with the ethernet cable.
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Back in our school days we often had LANs with some friends, about 8 to 10 people. That was enormous fun but everyone moved away for their jobs or education, so I’m stuck with Internet-only multiplayer now.
I also attended some bigger LANs (100-200 people) but they didn’t cater to my specific gaming preferences.
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Why are there no options for people who just like clicking in this survey? This is an outrage!
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Yeah, there really should be an “I like kittens” option.
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Mmmm, cats
*licks kitten*
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I’m at a lot of lans, used to go to the i-series a lot to the point where I was staff for a while, as soon as it became a retarded kiddie-fest I dropped it and moved over to a smaller event called epic.LAN.
less retards
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I’ve been to two LANs. Not big affairs like those i-series events, the ones I’ve been to were organized by a community of TF2 players and had about 20-25 people.
It’s a lot of fun: all sorts of games, camping, drinking, big takeout orders, BBQ, guitar hero area with a big couch, and rounders. It’s nice to be able to put faces to steam usernames.
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My gaming community (www.deadmen.co.uk) run our own LAN’s twice a year. We usually get about 50 guys show so it’s a good laugh.
That said, it’s becoming harder and harder these days to find games that fully support LAN gaming. Bad Company 2 has issues with players using the same external IP address, L4D2 is a total nightmare and alot of titles don’t even support LAN servers and/or require a significant amount of internet bandwith per player.
It’s a trend that means smaller LAN events like ours are going to be killed off, purely because we can’t afford to pay for a hefty 100meg link that we’d only use a few times per year :(
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I went to i30. Great weekend all things told, if only to laugh at the 15 year old CS players. (I was one once, so I’m allowed.)
Though I’m a bit beyond 18 hour straight gaming stints these days I’d come to a smaller RPS one in a heartbeat.
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I feel sorrowful for not having anything to do with lan gaming, ever. The nearest I’ve gotten is playing an internet game of L4D/Zombie Panic Source in the same room as my best mate, oh and playing CS in the same internet cafe as some guys whilst in China. They were very chinese.
Is it just like internet gaming except for less/zero lag and you can look around at each other?
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LAN gaming rules. Nothing better than spending a weekend playing with 20-30 close friends.
Any developer that drops LAN support is automatically added to my no-buy list (and theirs).
(except MMOs, obviously, which don’t interest me in the least)
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I’ve been to plenty of LANs for competitive gaming, lots of i series, plenty of smaller lans around europe and UK too.
I wouldn’t go to a “big” lan unless I was in a competition though, while a lot of the people there are OK there’s too many complete social idiots, piss and shit all over the toilet floor at iseries is all too common.
For “fun” gaming, i just usually meet up with 3 mates with PCs round at a house for a weekend of casual coop games…
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I think the largest LAN I’ve attended had around 100 attendees, but it was too large and impersonal for my taste. I prefer smaller LANs with 10-20 people, but that usually include quite an amount of alcohol too.
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Yes, but mostly small-house type gatherings of about 6-15 people in the garage with way too much beer and junk food. And Counter-Strike, MW2 or any other quick competitive games…
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I’ve been to The Gathering, the world’s second largest computer party (only Dreamhack beats it), 3 times so far. It’s great fun.
I’ve also hosted many LANs, usually of half a dozen to a dozen people.
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I used to throw 4-5 player LANs all the time back at uni, and for a while the society I ended up heading organised 20-60+ member LANs (until the cunting uni decided that since we weren’t a sports society we didn’t matter and decided not to let anyone other than sports teams use university rooms). Some day, I intend to go to something like QCon, I swear.
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Proper LAN party with 10-20 people all of whom are PC gamers is probably the best way to spend time with games. And to emphasize this, I’ll say it again. T-H-E best way.
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Lots of beer, plenty of junk food, 4 people Borderlands, Serious Sam, Diablo 2. Best week ever.
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Dreamhack World record holder Wooo!
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i attend mostly smaller privately organized lans with at max 30 players there.
lots of fun but the increasing lack of lan modus in newer games is continuing to cut into this experience.
so we tend to fall back to “the good old games” like CS 1.6, cod 2, age of empires 2, etc
it is a shame since most of the new games offer great small player number experiences over the internet but dont support lan gaming :(
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I have had LAN games of Quake, Serious Sam, UT2004 and Total Annihilation/SupCom at home before. Does that count?
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Everyone of my student houses used to have a lan party room where we had 3-6 pcs setup at any one time, it was wicked, just a pity my missus has no interest in Lan gaming….
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I have attended bigger LANs in the past, in an age when tubes were more clogged and LAN gaming was a way for everyone to actually be able to play “online” at all, but I’m too old for the “in-crowd” of events like DreamHack these days.
These days my friends and I get together for a bi-annual “Nerd LAN” where we play only retro games like GTA2 – (it’s free abandonware these days!), Quake, Warcraft, and the like, also mixed in with excellent new titles like L4D, L4D2. And beer, lots of beer!
We do it as an all day, all night event and it’s amazing how the time flies, you generally only have time to play two, three different games before it’s 5-6 am and your eyes start to melt.
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Never attended a LAN, would be happy to attend one with nice folk like the RPS users.
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Yes, No.
But about the first yes, the last LAN party i i did was like… 6 years ago.
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Yes, of the “dozen guys stuffed into a basement for a week” variety back when we were young and had a week where we could disappear from reality. Never been to a big event, got no real desire to.
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I’d rather play on the Internet, I’m timid
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I used to organize “unapproved” LAN events at college, using the science lab computers to play DOOM II deathmatch. The sysadmin had his mouse model number (which was printed on the empty mouse box faithfully kept by the main computer, calling all kinds of undue attention to it) as a password, so it was a breeze to set them with all privileges and delete the tracks.
Oh, boy, those were the times!
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I couple of i-series, which were good fun, despite being there with a COD clan.
But mainly lots of twice-termly 40+ people LANs at Uni. Those are some great LANs :D
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LANs are awesome. I used to spend most Saturday’s at my mate’s place Quakeing and Vietconging and Rogue Spearing and various other titles-ing over a LAN.
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Haven’t been to a LAN party for ages. Most people I know use unix-based laptops now, so they typically don’t run Windows games without some faff, and desktop PCs are heavy.
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Woops I hit no, under the impression ‘LAN Gaming Event’ is the big stuff, 1000′s of guys all playing Doom in a sweaty room. But reading comments a fair few have translated it as LAN gaming at all. Which for me is a Yes. I’ve done a bunch with mates all huddled up in a lounge with a tangle of cables running into a cheap HUB from ebuyer that’s busting from the strain. Ah them were the days. Not done it for a while though. Uni likes to throw a spanner in the works.
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The PC Gamer Showdown (I uploaded the videos of Never Mind the Games, Cocks to YouTube, http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=2C518AD64EF17146), and my uni’s gaming society (http://www.fragsoc.co.uk/) hold three a term, usually 30-100 people a time.
I’d be interested in an RPS LAN, assuming it’d be quite sedate (no marketing cocks yelling at people trying to lift heavy buckets to win some RAM while hired costume goons with fake MP5s hover around looking minimum wage) and smallish. Of course location and accessibility from Uni/home would be a big factor. If you contact FragSoc with more info when things are decided we might send a delegation, helping with transport etc.
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I remember setting up very small LAN parties with maybe one or two friends at my friend’s house. I was maybe 10 or 11 years old. My friend lived pretty close, maybe 1km between our houses, so I could transport my desktop computer by pulling it in a sled in winter and putting wheels on the sled in summer.
After that I regularly started hosting/attending to max. 10 people parties in random intervals. I also had a “neverending LAN party” with my ex-flatmate, since our computers were in the same room and most of the free time we used to play games like TF2, SupCom, ArmA2, but our favourite LAN game with 3-4 players was indisputably Half-Life 1 DM in Crossfire.
I’ve also attended some bigger events with around 100 people in the last 6-7 years, with a 3 year gap between the latest and the one before it. I used to love them, with all the excitement of BF1942 and other shooters with a load of people without any lag. Now that I attended the latest, I didn’t feel anymore that it was my thing. Mostly because 70% of the attendees were annoying and loud CS/WoW/whatever they play nowadays kids.
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I hit no, but quite a few times we’ve played LAN games in our flat (4 uni students + a couple of friends with laptops) until silly hours in the morning. Like some other people reading the comments I guess this counts too? One of our more memorable nights was starting a sins of a solar empire game at around 9pm (for most of us, our first time playing it too), and playing the same game until 7am, just because we wanted to finish! It was crazy.
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Have you ever attended a LAN gaming event?
Total Voters: 893
* Yes (59%, 528 Votes)
If so, was a big LAN event like one of the i events, or Dreamhack, or QuakeCon? Anything like that?
Total Voters: 638
My brain. It hurts.
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Oh crumbs! I voted no to both before remembering that we had hosted a few LANs in our student house. Was a fun time but i guess my mind doesn’t really classify it as a LAN event like that depicted at the top of the article.
Anyway, didn’t anyone from the big publishing and development houses tell you that LAN is dead?
/sarc
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The only multiplayed games I play are LAN ones at home with friends. HOMM2 and 3, AvP 1 and 2, Earth 2150 and Rune War. Any multiplayer game without LAN play is a definite no-purchase from me. I’m not interested in playing strangers – I like to have a chat with my friends or family after each game over a coffee, laughing about the high points.
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Been to The Gathering for 5 years straight now, a very select few local small LANs and a bunch of private LANs with my friends.
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Yeah – Age of Empires 3 House Party next weekend :D
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We have a gaming society at Glasgow Uni (called Pause Gaming) and we run our own LANs every month. We usually get ~ 20 people in one room with lots of CAT5 cables, it can get pretty sweaty…and drunken.
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Since my friends and i have all moved apart from eachother over the years, we usually get together once or twice a year for a LAN event. This usually includes about 20-24 people and we do both PC and 360 LANs.
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House and internal clan LANs, but also medium-size competitive LANs with 50-100 seats. Nothing truly massive like Quakecon.
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I’m I.T. (pro-nerd) and the department and I (5 of us) play a LAN game every day at lunch. CS or Battlefield Heroes (I know, shutup).
We use a local Mumble server to chat with each other since yelling crap about ‘that time at band camp’ isn’t advisable in an office, call each other names and talk about people’s mothers. It’s pretty damn fun actually.
The best part? That I get to gib my boss, and my boss’s boss. A lot, cause they sux (you heard me strongnutzz)
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i’m thinking most non lan players will read the title and skip the post. SO your vote tally might not be accurate. I almost did.
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Videogames can be fun, but you need LAN to get in epic levels.
Most of my LAN gaming has ben in cybercafes, or moving a lot of computers to some guy house.
Good times.
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Yes, I’ve attended with friends back in the day when a good ping online was 200, so LANs were good for Counter Striker (when Siege still had a tank) practice.
No, it was only a small event.
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I’ve only ever done informal LAN-ing at friends’ houses (up to around ten people), and even these are becoming infrequent as it becomes logistically more difficult to get everyone together on the same weekend. Typically we spend hours getting everyone connected to the network and set up with all the right games and the latest patches… and after all that we end up just playing Gauntlet in MAME. Good times.
In a flat I was living in years ago, we drilled a hole through one of the outside window frames, then ran a network cable out through the balcony and up the wall to the guy who lived above me. Christ knows how the real estate never caught on.
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Been to a 200+ person LAN event in Virginia back in ’03. Capital Punishment was the name, and it was uber-fun and they would even order you a case of Bawls if you wanted one when you registered.
Soooo hilarious running behind a guy in CS 1.6 and hearing his teammate (who was spectating him) going “AHHHHHHH OMG” across the room. The guy I’m trailing turns around and gets a noscope Scout shot in the face. Ahh, great times. Then there was a 64-man classic Half-Life deathmatch with whole rooms of crowbar-wielding turds that got MURDERED with well placed nades and satchels… [/nostalgia]
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I attended the wireplay LAN in Birmingham which was the original commercial testrun for the i series, it was pretty much quakeworld and quakeworld only, pure light-hearted joy with about 80 people and I actually got a bit teary when everyone was packing up to go home. Ah the little pentium 133 with 16mb of ram and a 33.6k internal modem finally saw a ping less than 300!
Followed by “wireplay insomnia ’99″ in Bicester an altogether larger affair held in a big hall at an army base, the load from all the computers blew out the powergrid for most of the first day and they gave everyone a free drink to make up for it, which sort of snowballed from there and many of us got quite merry indeed and subsequently far less games playing went on but equally fun.
Skipped the next couple and didn’t return till i3 which was split over three or four rooms at Swindon FC, it had gotten big and segregated already and although great to see some of the old gang again I left promising myself not to bother again in the future.
Which is a convoluted history lesson in why have to answer yes and no to that second question.
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I’ve never been to a LANparty, but I used to go to gaming cafes and play FPSs with my friends quite a lot, I suppose that counts, doesn’t it? It’s quite a different vibe playing with people in the same room than over the internet.
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Well was attending Dreamhack back when it actually was a Lan party, nowdays it’s just a game festival without any of the nice lan party things.
><.
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Definitely. It’s a big thing around my area (western new york) we have multiple LAN groups and two major LAN’s a year with over 100 attendee’s each.
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my friends and i are working verry hard at running a lan in our town at the moment and we will be having our first event verry soon, im pumped, it wont be too big we are aiming at comfotably accomadating 80 ppl for our first event and growing it from there, all out profits go back into the lan so we all volenteer.
any one wanna donate prizes??
if so follow my name link and let us no on the site. thx =]
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I love attending lans. There is 2 commercial ones held every year in Winnipeg. Sponsers come and set up tables and give money for tournys. About 150-350 people show up depending on the year. There are 1-4 lans held everymonth. The Uni’s hold most of them, but local game shops (there is a great Asian one on Corydon) In Winnipeg, if you want to, you can goto LAN’s all the time.
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Just recently moved to Oslo, anyone know of some good LAN events in the area? On the same note, anyone interested in creating said LAN events?
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I go to Local LAN parties multiple times a year. They are hosted by a group of gamers that are basically my 2nd family. I have known some of them for over 6 years now and there is a close bond that has formed among us. We organize the events through google groups and have internet gaming sessions every Saturday night, playing our current game of the week. We also do annual trips to PAX, QuakeCon, and other large local LAN events. While LAN gaming started as something just for fun, it’s now much more than that. I look forward to going to them to just hang out and have a good time instead of trying to rack up the best kill score. The lan parties run three days(Fri night-Sunday afternoon) or more and attendance is from 8 to 20+. We have some awesome guys who host everything at their houses and never ask anything except to bring a sleeping bag and pillow. Food is always in plentiful supply and it’s always an awesome time.
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been to the iSeries twice now, i37 and i40 (the summer ones).
unlike a lot of the “I liked it before it was cool” folk in this thread ( :P ) I’ve never had an issue with cleanliness of rowdiness (well, the showers can get quite grim, but there is 2000 people trying to use them – luckily there’s enough toilets that they never become an issue)
only main issue is it’s so far south (there’s 6 of us travel down from edinburgh and parts north) but what can you do? As many of our community as can make it travel down (about 30 this year) and it’s basically like having our own meet-up hosted for us. also, the TF2 tent this year was epic :D
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One or two LAN house-parties years ago in college. Be a huge hassle today though. Back then I had my PC in a small, lightweight case made of aluminum and plastic. These days I’ve got a gargantuan monster of a case made of cast iron and bricks. Or at least it feels that way whenever I have to move it.
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Used to do a couple with friends back in school and go to a lovely little internet cafe in guildford that used to do lan gaming, had a couple of birthday parties there too when I like 13/14. Nowadays most of my friends don’t really play pc games they’re more into consoles even though I’ve stayed faithful to the cause. Plus I play my games on a laptop because of uni so I think I’ll probably get laughed at if I turned up to a real lan party with my puny laptop but would be interested in an RPS one if said laughing didn’t occur
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i attended some 1.6 lans in romania
lans rulle :D
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Back in high school and the early days of university would see small (1-10 person) lans all the time. But moving to different parts of a province makes them less frequent now.
Though, it’s not really a lan party for us until someone is using an old wooden door as a table and cardboard boxes to prop it up over a recliner.
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Went to i40. That was so damn awesome.
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Yes.
And No, all the LANs I’ve attended have been smaller affairs (than those depicted above), from 3-6 people in my friend’s basement playing Age of Mythology, to a school organized LAN in a large auditorium, complete with tournaments and prizes.
I still have fond memories of playing Q3 in one of those tournaments.
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I’ve not attended any LAN parties, though not for lack of trying. Apparently, Kansans are console gamers, not PC gamers, so I’m a lonely minority
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Yes/No here. I was lucky in that my college had a dedicated gaming club that would host bimonthly overnight LANs as well as smaller weekly LANs.
But I generally didn’t do a BYOC, instead I would focus on stuff like Rock Band. They set up a TF2 server for when they had their LANs and would open it up to all of campus, so I’d go back to my room and hop on that, rather than dragging my desktop along.
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I go to a quarterly year LAN. It’s the SWLAN (south west Lan) and we usually get between 50 to 100 people come. It’s sponsored by iiNet and we play a variety of games, on both consoles and PC
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VOTED no both, no big lan even that I have been aware of in Vancouver or any that caught my interest.
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I haven’t been to one of the 300+ person ones around here in a quite a while.
I do however hold a LAN in my home about once a quarter with about 20 or so people attending each time. Also do a beach house LAN/week of gaming thing once a year.
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I said no, but will own to having played a little bit in the PC gaming room at a local gaming con a couple of times. Mostly on Crossfire, the real-time multiplayer Unix-based roguelike. I can’t drag my PC around, as it is very heavy, don’t enjoy competitive multiplayer in the least and can think of only a couple of cooperative multiplayer games with LAN support, even if it wouldn’t be massively easier to just do it over the internet. I grant you there’s something to be said for playing in the same room, but that’s much easier to muster in same-system console gaming.
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Alas, I only ever did games in-house. That is, play games against my brother over the old apples we had. Probably because I don’t have gaming friends. Well, of the type we can easily play.
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I’ve been to the last 7 DreamHacks, so I think I’ll have to go with yes on both questions.
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Maybe I should add that we (6 friends and I) had a rotating LAN-party every other week for about 4 years.
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We also used to have almost bi-weekly LAN´s rotating between our parent´s houses, usually between 5 and 10 guys, sometimes as many as 16. Quake2, Quake3, Starcraft and Diablo where our usual drugs. :-)
I actually kinda miss it, the first one to have his PC up and running usually opened up a Q2 DM server, with Q2DM1, until everybody got their PCs set up.
Sadly, after some years it kinda died down, with everybody moving away and then everybody had internet and you just played online instead of lugging all your stuff around the city.
Also went to some bigger LAN´s (100+) and one really big one (~2000, the gXp3 in germany, but that was too big for my taste)
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Ahhh LANs! Let me count the many ways I love thee :D I’ve never been to a large LAN but back in the day have done a reasonable number of house lans at various mates houses. I say back in the day because it’s been ages since a house lan now :( People have grown up and now have responsibilities such as kids and girlfriends (who needs a girl when you have a cat. Am I rite?(John Walker: Yes, you are right))
House lans are so fucking mint though. I have such awesome memories of them and wish I could get back into a regular routine of carting the old girl round to someone’s house and enjoying a quality weekend of games, shit sleep, awesome food (from now on anyway. me and my mate always go NUTS when we meet up and do some truly stunning cooking. Pizzas and brownies but they’re LUSH!)
I’ve also been to a few lans held in a community hall in an absolute dump of a village with around 20 or so people. Some good lans there and also some crap ones due to some people being inconsiderate dickheads. Always had fun and games with the power there as well. Every single lan would see the power tripping out until a magic pig decided to allow the power to work. Thanks magic pig.
I am actually off to a house lan in about a month though. First one in god knows how long. A mates missus is shipping out for the weekend (thankfully) so about 8 of us are descending onto salisbury. Hah, can’t wait! Plus I’m starting a job soon after so will actually have some money to spend so will probably be organising a 20-30 person lan in cardiff which is going to be DOUBLE CAT AWESOME!
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I do a mix of small 5-8 person LANs at a friend’s house and larger 40-80 person events at the local university. Went to a local Intel LANFest event last October, ended up having a couple hundred people show up. Don’t know if that counts as a “large” event, but it was certainly corporate sponsored; had giveaways of gobsmackingly expensive hardware and everything.
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Also, having the whole thing set up in a Shriners ballroom was a suitably surreal experience–mirrorball lights reflecting off of the shinier casemods, weird Egyptian-themed secret doors on the way to the toilets. Great times.
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