Sacramento LANFest Great Escape III
Jan
25

LANFest Crew is always experimenting with better ways to organize and run our events. So for LANFest Great Escape 3 I'm trying a new Game Lieutenant idea. Here's the quick run-down, I'm looking for gamers at the Lan to step up and be in charge of one game. When and how you want to organize players in that game will be up to you. Whenever people want to play a game they can come the Game Lieutenant of the game they want play to find others who want to play that game. They can either be organized into matches and servers, or setup up a time to play together later.

If there is interest the Game Lt. can run a small tournament, contest, or so on; with get this, full support from the staff! All the LAN apps and tools will be made available to the Game Lt. such as Mumble (VOIP), LANHub (Brackets), Game Servers (Bunch of great Lan servers), and announcements (just see ForceRun). So I will make a list of the top 15 games from the survey and post it shortly, if there are any other games that there are a few people wanting to play those can be add too. Please at the event if you are willing to be a Game Lieutenant and the game that you want. Any leftover games will be assigned at the event on Friday night or Saturday.

So why do this? Well, I have been going to LANs for a long time now. There is coordination problem to get like-minded gamers into game servers to fill all but the most popular game. Small, 30 seats or less, house style LANs it is easy to get everyone in to one game to play at a time; as the attendees understand they all have to play the same game to fill a server. Expo sized LANs, of 600 seats or more, are generally have enough people playing at any given time that most games have at least one server with healthy and fun population.

Most the LANFest events fall in the gap between small and expo sized LANs. These sized LANs can have the issue that only one or two game servers are full at a time, sure there are a lot of people there to play, but unless there is some official game going on the general game servers are a little shy on players. On the other side it is really hard for the Staff to organize all the game servers and match up attendees that want to play the games. Neither is this as fun as the attendees just free playing the different games as you please.

Gamers that come to the LAN in large groups or clans are generally happy hanging out with their group during the LAN and play the same game as the group. This leaves out at times gamers that don't have a group at the LAN, also there can be a lot of members of the group that have a personal favorite game that is not popular in their group so they general will not have an opportunity to play that game at the LAN. The LANFest crew has tried a lot of different contest and events to work through this issue and fill up servers. I hoping have the community step up and fill the role of organizing the free-play gaming at LANFest we all can have more enjoyable experience. So think about being a LANFest Game Lieutenant, the task should be pretty easy to handle, and can make a big difference at the event.

-ForceRun