Hosting a LAN

[Gearijigu]

I live in a small town of about 10,000 people nedless to say ther'es not lan''s happening anywhere... so I thought that i might try my hand at hosting one. so far the things on my checklist include the obvious like getting some local sponsors and advertising and a venue but after that I'm pretty lost if anyone on TLN has experience tips or suggestions please share. also if i do host something like this is it better to charge entry and then kick out some prizes? Thanks much

[Brwn]

If it's just a simple LAN, find a reasonably sized venue, but that costs the cheapest, and make sure the power is good; you don't want the power to short circuit while you're trying to put in the last flag in a game. Also, try to keep admission to a minimum, and you don't need prizes unless you want to make it a local tourny; in that case, you can either charge a tourny registration fee or make the admission fee enough to pay for the venue and then have some leftover for the prize money.

[phreekopath]

Getting a venue that's in your price range might be harder than you think. Just FYI, we had to sift through about 12 hotel conference areas before we found one that was large enough, had enough tables/chairs, and the power demands, and it was nearly $1000 to get for 24 hours, and they had a lot of resrtictions about outside food and stuff. Also, hotel internet is often proxied and you have to click the "i accept" button to get online, and you can't do that on an xbox. We managed to find a way around it, but it's something to note if you want to allow people to sign into XBL or have their stats recorded on bungie.net

Beyond that:

Really good power strips. I like 12-outlet ones, so you can set up 4v4 stations and everyone has a plug, and you have plugs for the switches too, and they're usually about 5 foot long. Ones with internal breakers are nice, if one gets overloaded, it won't trip a breaker in the building and shut the whole LAN down, just one "station" will go down.

Ethernet cables. Cat6 if it's in your budget, but if not cat5e is plenty good enough. Also request that everyone brings their own, but i assure you, most won't, so be prepared for that.

Switches. This can get tricky. If you want to segregate the stations into blocks of 8, then just an 8 port switch for each station is fine. But if someone on station "A" wants to play someone on station "B" it gets more complex, as you'll have to interconnect the stations. Not sure how big you're wanting this to get, so I won't really go further than that. If you want more info, I'll be glad to help.