Frag-o-thon1

Frag-o-thon1

An overnight LAN

Dates: 2pm - 10am 15th of December 2007
Venue: Blaxland High School Hall
Attendance : 43 / 60

Photos


Overview

Our first overnight lan in a long long time. Which went rather well and much fun was had by all.

Bens Review

Format shamelessly stolen from chris

Overview:
Date: 15/12/07
Attendance: 42
Brief: too much V and no sleep makes Staff very jumpy.

Power:
With a change of location and smaller numbers power was not a issue Blaxland hall has at least twice the capacity of st marys power wise, due to this being a smaller event we also tried out little Betty (our smaller power system)and she worked with out fault.

Network:
This lan, Netgear came to the plate and provided two 48port full gig switches, unfortunately we seemed to have some problems with one of them witch caused some issues for one table. we where able to resolve this by shifting people over to a spare ports on the other switch. Speeds where very strange. again i think this was due to faulty switches. most transfers where around the 4 mb/s mark.

Gaming:
COD 4 Was the game to play this lan and Dancers dedicated servers coped a thrashing.
I saw allot of gaming going on in general witch was good and while dc hub did get a thrashing the lan didn't turn into a total leach fest.

Atmosphere:
i think that the atmosphere at this lan was great. i think that we learned a lot of things for future events.
lighting is something that we will never bother with again. it was more of a pain then good.
i think that next time we will need to set-up more speakers at a lower volume. that way we don't blast the people at the front so the people at the back can here. I was only told that the music was to loud once and it was turned down quickly
the projector set-up at this hall was nothing short of amazing and allowed us to do some cool stuff with games and music vids.
the pizza and kebab runs seamed to work out well many thanks to bob and element for being drivers.
Anyway the majority seemed to a great time and the feedback has been very positive and thanks to those spent the time to give us your feedback and ideas. Also thanks to those who stayed back afterwards and stacked a few tables and chairs, its greatly appreciated.

Regards,
Ben
Fragfest Staff

Feedback from Whitefox

May I first congratulate Ben aka Benzor and his staff - Dancer, Raven and Tiny (if I've forgotten anyone I'm sorry) - for a brilliant overnight LAN.

The LAN was excellent, with fun to be had all round and the mood was very relaxed and felt like the perfect venue for the casual gamer.

Unlike other LANs this was a much more relaxed event without the stress of tournaments and competitive behavior. Sure there was in-game competitiveness but what kind of game would it be without it.
It was much more relaxed and the main thing is everyone had FUN!.

The power went off without a hitch.

The network was fine, and the increased time and network speeds allowed many of us to stock our hard drives with free ware and other similar software. I have to say it was faster and I heard rumor someone was getting 7mb a second!? (own up!)

Gaming, Now...I think we are all in agreement that Cod4 took the show and in future events I hope this continues with people catching up with the hardware needed to play this game. All I can suggest that if you don't have this game, go buy it now, It is well worth the price and both single player and Multi player are brilliant. So get in before the next LAN and join the new fad. I think Steam is even selling it.

Other games played where Flatout2 and then the dregs of what I saw being played were Bf2, Crysis for whoever could run it, SupCom and commando? (can't remember what its called). But plenty of games and fun was had by all.

The atmosphere as I've described above was great, just relaxed and everyone having fun. The lighting which Ben and his crew have to be thanked for again was great but I don't think they'll be putting as much effort into the next Frag-a-thon with all the crazy disco lights. But still it created a relaxed mood and set a good tone for the day and night.

Music I believe at times was just slightly too loud but was soon adjusted. Also the choice of music was great being background music and at night time I believe the music was a lot slower and cruisy which was great.

The food was good as well. I think everyone enjoyed their pizza (except for one) and it was a lot less hassle than a BBQ.

By around 9am it started to wrap up and people were packing down. Thanks to everyone who helped on the clean up, which an be a daunting task for a handful of people.

Over all, a great LAN was had and more must follow. Ben and his team did a great job and I hope its just a forerunner of many more overnight LANs to come.

10/10

Feedback from Kalibur

I loved the overnight LAN, and it's location (it was a little easier to travel from Orange hehe). As WhiteFox said before, the atmosphere was very relaxed and enabled us to all play our games better in my opinion, with a lot less yelling out than the last LAN I was able to hear people's footsteps and gunfire from off in the distance.

I had not played Call of Duty 4 (CoD4) multi-player until the LAN and I must say I enjoyed it thoroughly. I seriously do hope it is involved in the next LAN, with perhaps a CoD4 tournament? There were enough people playing for a few teams at Frag-o-Thon and we had roughly 1/3 of the people there than we usually do at a normal LAN.

The chairs weren't that great, though, and after about 14 hours they really did start to annoy me (note to self, bring a chair next time!). There were some people who brought their own chairs and I envied them for thinking of that haha.

I left about 6am or so, I was downloading at less than 1MB per second for some reason, but I was ready to go (everybody was watching movies and such, which was great). I fell asleep in the car for about an hour before heading off and the remaining 3-4 cars around me were gone by the time I woke up lol, hope nobody took photos :).

Overall it was a great LAN and I would be more than happy to see more popping up in the new year.

Thanks to all who attended and to all those who I played against in the LAN games.

KaLibuR