Home » Forums » L3 » Feed back on L3 #47

my only complaint was lack of just about anything organized on the scale its been previous L3s, and they may have been reasons (we didnt even play Zero Gear demo did we?) If there was organized gaming, maybe a better attempt to let everyone know it was going down? Other than that, it was great.

On the other hand, I enjoyed having the time to meet new people by seeing what everyone else wanted to play on DC++. It reminded me of my first L3 experiences.

Now I haven't had the pleasure of attending a L3 lan for quite some time. I think the last proper job was 4 or so years ago. It was nice to catch up with KJ, even if it was a chat outside the place on what he's been doing. Good to see Solid Snake and get him to show me how to kill zombies.. (badly I might add) and also smash him on hedgewars! :D

It was also nice to join in on random conversations regarding McDonalds and some insight into what does or does not go on behind the scenes.

The same comradely behavior was there as it was the very first time I ever went to L3. Especially as I had to work out what the hell I needed to do to get programs/games working properly.

However the one thing that hasn't changed that I would have expected to have been fixed or at least implemented is a scheduled timing of games. It was nice that I got a piece of paper with what games were going to be used, but no times, no tournament structure and no one really leading it. However as this was the first one I've attended in quite sometime then this may have been a once off.

I would also add - any conversations between the administration team about how the lan is progressing, things that should or should not be done, or why the numbers of the lan might be down etc etc should be discussed either behind closed doors, or a little less public than just wander up to and go from there.

Yes the numbers looked lean. But seeing as it was waitangi weekend - But not a long 3 day one that may not have helped. Other events, such as classical sparks, race car events,warm weather people still on holiday may have been a factor.

If you are looking for a silver bullet to drag more people in, then Im not the person to answer that one. Perhaps offering something that isn't available via internet gaming/torrent sites so easily. A look to retro gaming perhaps by playing games that are older but require a little less skill than someone who plays it quite often. : UT2k3 fps etc etc. Go find some old arcade games and have those lining the sides for a break away of the normal gaming. Nice idea with the dj hero etc, but I didn't see that go on the fri/sat nights.

The $30 price didn't seem too high. Maybe prebooking/preregistering before a lan for a discounted price payment in full sort of thing.

But the main thing is.. I still enjoyed myself it was still good, and you are still doing a good organising them in your spare time. So keep it up.. I'd say eventually the kinks will be ironed out in time with a view to better planning.

Noob1ett - Agreed, there wasn't enough organized games run at this Lan - this will be back to the same standard as #46 come next Lan. Reason being we had issues in the lead up to this event which ment we didn't have the time/staffing to plan as much as we wanted.
As far as Zero Gear went - there was some technical problem with the game (which was tested a few weeks prior), and the extra software that we got to help didn't solved the problem. AFAIK Solidsnake changed his organized game on the day because of this.

Dragon - L3 has always been quite a open organization, and we like to discuss with our attendees what they like & their opinions about the events.
Speculation on the lower numbers is a good discussion point as it allows us to get an outside perspective on the problem.
As far as talking behind closed doors etc, nothing that wasn't already public knowledge (or commercially sensitive) was discussed in front of any attendee.
Thank you for your opinion on price tho, its very helpful to get feedback especially on this subject.

One point about your post i must comment on tho is these events are not organized in our spare time, all admins are actually taking time off from their respective jobs to work at an L3 & also spend several hours every day working on L3 related projects.
This Lan may have seemed a little disorganized with games but you would have noticed how smoothly the networking & especially our new internet connection went - these are things that take alot of time & effort to get right.

The lack of really being able to play any steam games due to issues with steam or the internet meant zero gear never happened, or tf2...

Hopefully the next one offers up a bigger group of people. Were a few things going on that weekend that probably limited numbers.
I do know a few people that simply could not be bothered going, which is not good.

Everything did seem a little unorganised this time, but i did hear a few comments about being short staffed from the admins.
Maybe going back to using the projector to announce things would be a good idea.

Other than that it was a good lan, a few good games played and a good group of people. No technical issues at all.

Yes, that was one game that we couldn't get working actually. Maximinus and I tried to get a game going to test, but we couldn't get it working at all. We could launch Steam and after quite some time we were able to log on. Even after logging on however, we couldn't seem to Launch the game at all. Lastly the show stopper seems to be the fact that multiplayer was actually disabled in the demo. I did ask for a lan only copy ... but oh well.

Organised gaming is tough to get going unless we have enough admins on board. We would need to have about three admins on at the given time, two admins need to sort of look after the lan event and the other admin can handle the game.

Yeah, last lan we had that planned out and it worked out pretty awesome. Unfortunately, as I said above, a skeleton crew doesn't help us. When we have a full staff, we usually don't have too much of a problem to organise it.

Mmm, that's interesting. Perhaps we may be more aware of this next time round.

Yeah, usually new stuff that gets introduced into the lan tends to never work the first time round. Hopefully as time goes along, we'll perfect the internet.

Mmm, wow, yeah that was something I wasn't expecting. I suppose the fact that you have to pack up all of your PC, then lug it all the way to somewhere in town can be a bit tiresome.

Skeleton staff unfortunately. We look after the core aspects of lan as much as possible first. Unfortunately, when things go right, not many people notice it :) But it is still an entirely valid point; and you know perhaps there will be ways where we can fix that sort of issue in the future. There are probably some great tools or methods to solve this ... but we haven't quite figured this out just yet.

Yeah. I'm currently working on the intranet stuff now, which is one aspect that I wanted to fix for a long time.

Thanks!

I can completely agree to the level of prep which actually goes into arrainging the games, so the question I have is... Why not have the community suggest/help run games? Or even run things from the forums to organize game times and games beforehand via the forums? theres plenty of regulars who visit and i'm sure some could be coaxed to help out. just a suggestion

Three points I want to make about this:

• Orillion has stepped up the last two lans to run a few games (Multi Theft Auto) and he's done an awesome job. Given that he's stepped up and asked us if he could do it shows excellent initiative. Unfortunately, not every one can be bothered.
• I've been burnt in the past by this. People have told me that they would run x event at y time. I announce it, said people don't turn up to the lan at all, aren't present at the lan during the time they scheduled or no longer want to run the event due to z reason. Unfortunately, it's usually us that gets the blame for not running the organised game.
• Unfortunately, when people come to lan they expect to be entertained. It's also unfair of us to say "If you think you can do a better job, you go do it then.". I know that isn't the message you had intended, but that is how most people perceive it.

For reasons that I don't quite understand, people seem to think you absolutely need to have dedicated servers all the time to do anything. People are very unwilling it seems to actually host a server. Usually I wind up hosting a listen server and performance on my old rig is just fine. I don't quite understand why people with much faster machines than mine simply don't want to host a server. It confuses me.

Im not sure if it was exactly not being bothered going, a few people prefer a certain other lan, for reasons beyond my comprehension.
And a few others just got mass effect 2 and preferred a weekend of that over l3 I guess.

Ahh ok. Well, sometimes people do prefer smaller lans due to the close knit atmosphere. It's pretty hard to know everybody at L3 these days due to the size we are, where as a lan that's 10 people large... it's much easier.

So you're saying SS, that the best way to approach this (from my angle) would be to encourage/host games on the fly at the LAN? the game I most want to do this through is Trackmania, I know theres several who play it outside of LAN and could be enticed into doing so at a LAN, I just need to get the tracks (which I have now) and be able to host the server at an opportunistic time?

But not as hot as last time, which was nice. Not that the weather is under the admins' control but the one at the end of last year was just... slimy... :apoplectic:

I didn't have any problems with Steam, then again I never did when there wasn't internet either :shrug:

And I'd also tick the lack of organised games box. I'm not saying everything has to be organised beforehand, putting stuff up on the projector works just fine. DC chat doesn't always reach everyone :undecided:

Hosting your own games isn't exactly a hard thing to do, on the Saturday night I hosted a game of GRID and had about 8 people playing it. I would have hosted a game of TrackMania, but forgot about it.

But still, nothing beats playing Mario Cart 3 player on the same computer :D.

About the not knowing what games are being played, it isn't hard to get up from time to time and take a look around the place, if you can see three or four people playing the same game, there is a high chance it his being played multiplayer and if you talked to one of them, you could join them.

Something that could be fun would be a few rounds of BF1942 or DCFinal, older games like that a good fun and everyone can run them well.

Any chance of having an organized Modern warfare 2 session? Im keen

Definitely room fans would be helpful here. Certainly one of those items on our to buy list; but there are some other important things we still need to spend on.

It'd be great to be able to announce organised games of newer games, but we've been pretty badly burnt by new games back in the past. Either they have some really nasty copy protection which requires an internet connection, throw hissy fits at the lan or simply don't work well.

So we only really typically announce games that we know that work :)

Perhaps theres a potential method in the future to announce a new game + back up just incase the new game does fail.

Not likely due to the way it hosts games (read peer to peer & random choice of host) plus the online only nature of the copy protection.

my only problem was the heat,
where did god go? he had the 1337 aircon.
oh and my comp not posting when i got it home (fort that was ment to happen at the lan, gess murphy missed)
other than that was great lan,
loved the vouchers :eyebrows:

Yeah it does get pretty hot and humid while we're there. Not 100% sure what happened to GoD these days. I guess he's been pretty busy with things. We'll see how we go in Winter and if its still really hot and humid then we'll try to do something about it. Some stand up fans would probably go a long way, but it depends how much it'll cost.

ill bring one, and another big fan (1000mm) if you would like,
fans and lights is wat i got lots of

Thank you :)