LAN Parties (and WAN, I guess) - Manchester

FrenchTart

FrenchTart

FrenchTart

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Joined
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Manchester
Manchester LAN Event in August

We run regular lan parties in Manchester. Currently we usually have between 10 and 14 people crammed into our house...

I've been thinking recently of trying to turn these into more 'professional' lan parties hosted at a local venue. Obviously this'd require grabbing some cash from the people at the LAN to cover costs of rent/etc and a bit more serious organisation (I've had experience of running other 'clubs' things in the past, so most of it isn't new).

Just wondering if anyone had had much experience with this and/or if anyone has any recomendations of venues in Manchester (pref. as central as possible). Also, any links to other hosted events in Manc as I wouldn't want to step on anyone's toes :) I remember their used to be one that ran every couple of months but I've lost the URL.

One other thing that'd be a bit of a downer is that we currently make the LAN server available to the inet so as to make up numbers. I guess that might be hard/impossible in a random venue.

Sorry to waffle, but just wanted people's input :)
 
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Ah cool. I'm in Fallowfield atm (still living with my old student housemates - fun).

If you forward some details to my email address, I'll let you know as and when I get anything organised. I've got an eye on a few sites already, they're just not as optimal as I'd like :)

the french
tart at hotmail
dot com

By details, I guess I just mean your email address and name lol.

Also the kind of games you prefer. We have loads of different tastes atm but we tend to play a lot of the following (happy to change though):

Savage, Halo, Quake3/UrbanTerror, FEAR, StarCraft (when I can convince enough people, lol) and others. Time before last we spent a couple of hours playing SOLDAT, too - really cool retro game.
 
Im in Urmston ( south west manchester ) and wouldnt mind coming along, depends on the price and that, and what games are played.
 
Oook...

We have a fairly serious CS:S player that comes along already so I should be able to get him to setup a decent server (if I did it, it'd no doubt be kind of n00bish) :p

I assume you mean UT2004/5 rather than the original (that was the last one I played properly) lol? Will look into it.

/re COD2 - what's the minimum spec PC that'd run it decently, any ideas? I'm pretty sure my system will be fine as it's fairly beefy, but we do have some people that run gf4ti4200s and I'd like to be able to include them as much as possible (though I'm not going to rule out a game just because some people can't support it). As long as it'll run for them in low, that's cool :)
 
Aekeron said:
Oook...

We have a fairly serious CS:S player that comes along already so I should be able to get him to setup a decent server (if I did it, it'd no doubt be kind of n00bish) :p

I assume you mean UT2004/5 rather than the original (that was the last one I played properly) lol? Will look into it.

/re COD2 - what's the minimum spec PC that'd run it decently, any ideas? I'm pretty sure my system will be fine as it's fairly beefy, but we do have some people that run gf4ti4200s and I'd like to be able to include them as much as possible (though I'm not going to rule out a game just because some people can't support it). As long as it'll run for them in low, that's cool :)
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Before i got my X1800 XT i was left using a Geforce MX400 and i could run COD2 on low at 800x600 with that, just about. And yea i mean UT2004 :)
 
Sounds good :)

I'll have a word with a few of the other people that organise our current lan parties and see if I can rope someone into it.

Should get a website/dedicated forum sorted too I guess.

We've discussed this for some time but only just started to actually sort anything :)
 
Hiho :) Always good to see a friendly face.

Tempted by the LAN party, lol? :p

One thing that I'll miss by hosting it at a random venue is having a decent inet connection. Seriously doubt we'll be able to find anywhere that provides anything near an adsl2+ connection :/

EDIT:

Oh yeah, sorted out some hosting last night...Just need to get forum/website up and running.

What do people think of "FrackFest" or "Frag'M"(anchester)?

There are better names about no doubt, but worse ones too ;)
 
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It's a bit of a trek from Manchester, but there's a southampton based lan I'm going to this weekend, the BIG GAME might be worth coming along to that, or someother lan, and see how it's run. I mention tBG cos it really is a good one :) Run really well too.
 
I'd really love to but sadly I'm stuck seeing my gf's mother for the weekend. Fun! :)

(To be fair, she's alright, but I'd still prefer to LAN) ;)

I'll check out the site and see what I can see, though...
 
Aekeron said:
I'd really love to but sadly I'm stuck seeing my gf's mother for the weekend. Fun! :)

(To be fair, she's alright, but I'd still prefer to LAN) ;)

I'll check out the site and see what I can see, though...
Click to expand...
I can help you with the website/forum, get me on msn, it's under my avatar to the left.
 
Cool. I'll try to when I get home from work tonight :)

EDIT:

One of my housemates (who's also involved in organising these, to a lesser extent) is rather uber with his graphics work so I'll prob make a fair bit of use of his graphics along with your website/forum skills if that's okay?

I've been reading up on setting up phpbb forums and it seems relatively straight-forward. Sadly, all my programming exp is anything and everything NOT to do with website creation and hence not being too great at sorting that sort of thing myself :)

Just some boring details for anyone that's reading...
 
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Sorry I didn't get online last night. Night at the gfs made it difficult to do mucho :)

We do have someone working on the site already (rl friend so it'd be kind of unfair to say "no, this guy is doing it") - sorry about that.

But anyhow, did some research into venues yesterday. Looks like school halls are popular, as are community centres... However, my gf is involved in the management of the Manchester Uni conferencing network so she's looking at that and seeing if anything seems suitable. Could in theory mean some really rocking venues :)

Website and/or forum should be up in some form or another in a week or less.
 
Hey all, sorry to bump this but I thought I'd mention that things are rolling somewhat now :)

We've got quite a lot of stuff organised, a venue sorted and some idea of the tournaments we're going to run. Still very much open to suggestions though, so if you fancy checking out the forum, the link is below:

http://www.fragm.co.uk

The booking form should be up in a few days but in the meantime, feel free to spam us with suggestions :)

Btw, does anyone know what kind of interest OCUK has in sponsoring this sort of event? Our 'person' will probably contact them soon but just wondered if if anyone has any exp with that sort of thing...
 
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I like the site design you have there, if i've passed my driving test by then i may think about coming down, is there any age limit? Ill be 17.5 by then, if not then i will definately come to future events when i'll be able to drive there.
 
In theory we have a limit of 18 (the site still needs a fair bit of info added, as you can probably see), however...

...I personally think 17.5 is close enough to 18 that we should make an exception. I'll have a word with the other organisers and see if I can convince them. We may need something silly like a parental disclaimer form (for insurance purposes) but hopefully we could swing it.

If you drop me an email or register for the forums, I'll keep you posted :)

(the forums may look kind of dead atm...but that's because most of the posts are on the staff forums which aren't accessible generally...honest) :p
 
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