LANSOAP 5 Feedback Thread

[SBB]

Thanks to all who came to the LAN!

How was it for you?

[Oblivion123]

I enjoyed it, the only thing that let it down for me was the lack of tournaments and organised games. In the end me and my mate had to rally around everyone to get them to play Sup Com and CoH.

People weren't being involved properly and were sat around doing whatever... Some guy spent the entire weekend on photoshop :S

Would just be great if there was more planning put into games since it was a LAN party after all. Also it would be cool if it was cheaper next time. You said it cost £400 to rent the village hall. I figure you got at least double that.

Other than that, it was great!

[SBB]

True, but I think the price is reasonable, so the "final" price may be reduced to 30 but i dont think it needs to go below this. You paid £35 but most of the people paid £20 due to the early booking discount (you probably missed this, it was £20 until 1st March), so this means I get a lot less money.

Rembmer, there are lots of other costs that go into the lan such as insurance, cabling, network equipment, switches, servers, projector equipment, consoles etc. etc. and any money not used is stored for future events. I am proud to say that i don't make a personal profit on lansoap events (other than using maybe a few pounds to by myself food and drinks at the event) and try to be as honest as possible as to where peoples money is being spent

As for tournaments, unfortunately at this LAN we didnt have any prizes which partially lead to no tournaments being run ... if i'm honest i've been very much bogged down with school work (lots of coursework was needed in in the last month) and haven't had too much time to plan, resulting in for instance the inexcusable rage emission over the COD4 server which I should of researched properly. On top of these problems most people didnt seem to be interested in the tournaments anyway ... although I may have been wrong

For the next LAN i will make sure we try to get some decent games with the whole lan running, and hopefully get a better turnout, as this will help with matters more. I can't take full responsibility for this as there were quite a few people at the lan who just wanted to relax, which is fair enough, but i think there should be at least a little coaxing to play some games :)

Glad you came anyway and thanks for the support, comments definitely taken onboard! Overall I think this LAN went well, no fundamental issues just needs a bit of "fine tuning"

[LordSkaled]

Meh I thought it was pretty good.
Probably comin down to next one.

I do think there should have been more games of CS and UT04 however, as I dont think I can remember playing those at all :0 heh

[spicypixel]

Overall I enjoyed it, not being a massive fan of CSS I didn't care much at its absence lol. CoD4 is my game of choice so I got my monies worth I reckons. (Even if I was knifing my way to victory :D:)

[luke a]

I'm not really much of a gamer nowadays since my shuttle cooked my graphics card and I don't have an upgrade path since PCI-E and DDR2 reared their ugly heads!

But I did have games installed that were listed on the site and in the e-mail sent out - yet I still didn't have enough! Someone would suggest playing a game and after I had mucked around trying to install it and update it the game would either be over or nearly over.

I think I played CS:Source for about 15 minutes, shame there wasn't a tournament as that is the only game I play at home. I couldn't care less about prizes as I probably wouldn't of won any, I just wanted to play.

We then played COD4 which was a shambles. I had never played the game before so didn't have a clue what weapons to pick, which class to be, what the maps were, even what I was supposed to be doing! The maps just seemed to go on for an eternity and the objectives just become so boring and repeative. Run from one HQ to the next like a headless chicken, try not to die, and spray madly at anything that moves. Then we had the farse of the bomb/defuse map that was 10v5... endured it for 15 minutes and gave up as it was utterly pointless - Auto team balance ftw? These rants aren't really aimed at the lan, more aimed at the game for being a load of rubbish.

Guitar Hero was fun even though I wasn't any good at it! I think even T-Bag, from Prison Break Series 2, would of scored more points with his mangy paw!

How to improve upon the next lan?

Is there any software we can install that will tell you what games are being played on any computers on the LAN without having to load up the games individually and do a server search? Like some people would just be playing games in small groups, though I would of joined them if I knew they were playing.

Tournaments - Even if it is just for fun!

An FTP server that has current files, for some reason I couldn't access anyone else's shared files on the lan, though I could access the ftp. XP x64 FTL!

A proper games list so I know what to install before I get to the lan. All the games I had prepared didn't really get played. I had installed and updated the following:

- Warsow
- TrackMania Nations
- CS
- CS:S
- BF2142
- TF2

[groinface]

As for tournaments, unfortunately at this LAN we didnt have any prizes which partially lead to no tournaments being run ... if i'm honest i've been very much bogged down with school work (lots of coursework was needed in in the last month) and haven't had too much time to plan, resulting in for instance the inexcusable rage emission over the COD4 server which I should of researched properly. On top of these problems most people didnt seem to be interested in the tournaments anyway ... although I may have been wrong

For the next LAN i will make sure we try to get some decent games with the whole lan running, and hopefully get a better turnout, as this will help with matters more. I can't take full responsibility for this as there were quite a few people at the lan who just wanted to relax, which is fair enough, but i think there should be at least a little coaxing to play some games :)

Glad you came anyway and thanks for the support, comments definitely taken onboard! Overall I think this LAN went well, no fundamental issues just needs a bit of "fine tuning"
"fine tuning" is a pretty optimistic way of putting it ;]

to be honest though, while i don't think many people got as much gaming done as they'd wanted to, pretty much everyone seemed to be having a good weekend; maybe it would have been better if we'd played more games (such as minidisk jenga) but considering the awkward dates, lack of any really popular games atm, and fairly low turnout i think we pretty much got the best of what we could.

for posterity's sake here's **** you need to sort for the next lan (aside from obvious stuff like having prearranged tournaments and all your games ready to go):

- some kind of large display featuring all noteworthy server addresses (dc, lan ftp, games etc) and tournament times. a poster will do but if you feel like being fancy it'd be perfect for this second projector you keep saying you're going to get.
- set tournament times beforehand and stick to them; don't delay stuff by more than half an hour because some **** has gone to get a pizza. if you constantly drill the times into people's heads then if they really want to play, they won't **** off.
- guitar hero and mame need to have separate displays.
- might be worth moving the projector screen to the opposite side of the room if it's possible; should block out more of the light from the main room, kitchen and perpetually open fire door.
- you need to shout "it's not live" and "it's live" louder D:
- some crazy guy came in on sunday and showed us how to turn off the underfloor heating in the sleeping room, so that shouldn't be a problem next time ;]
- use the website more; you could be getting a load of administrative hassle out of the way before the event even starts by having tourney signups and details prominently featured on the site. the irc channel is also pretty dead; i know there's not much you can do to jumpstart that, but it'd be nice if we could get some more discussion about who wants to play what games going on in irc or the forums.
- we should watch two chuck norris films next time, not just one \o/

regardless, i'll most likely be seeing you in july :]

edit: rofl swear filter

[Omegahunter]

Yes i think Lansoap5 was a good event, havent been to all of them so far i can say that it was the best run so far.

Ture there was a lack of tournaments. Seems it was more of a chill out event which happens at times, but everyone looked like they wanted to play CoD4 anyway.
CSs hide n seek was fun ( shame it had a bug that kept crashing it :(:

But i never go to lansoap to win anything just to have fun, which i did so for me at least it was a weekend well spent.

Thanks guys and see you at the next one. :)

[Jessop]

I had a good weekend,

Just sucks i missed Friday and only got there at like almost 1am !!

My cuz ( Si ) also lost his mobile there, and it was ON when he lost it by the time we relised a few hours later it was off so, not too happy about that :confused::confused::mad:

I agree with most of the comments said above though.

Im a bit dissapointed in the way there wasnt really anybody that was TELLING people to load games up as everybody should be playing UT2k4 or CoD4 or whatever.... I think it was oblivion? and spicypixel that managed to get me, Si and another one or 2 others onto Supreme Commander and eventually onto Company of Heroes, which ive never played before but a really enjoyable game, even if we had no hope in hell of winning unless we had twice the players, haha :D

Would have been cool to play something fun, altogether like Enemy Territory (the original free version).. or Defence Allience mod for UT.. so freaking fun !

[Minidisk]

Was fun, more plx :p

[LordSkaled]

Haha defence alliance for UT.. Yes! Should definitely play more of that next LAN, its an awesome game.

Also, i think the next LAN should have a dedicated person that goes to the shop as soon as it opens to get stuff... I wasted so much energy doing that trek backwards and forwards that would have been much better spent sat doing nothing at all :O

[Oblivion123]

Hail to Chuckie, teh Pr0n king!!! :P

[Jessop]

lol im so making a new account on this thing, ive not used the name Chuckie since before i left school lol. :|

and yes, i am the pr0n king :D