LAN Parties (and WAN, I guess) - Manchester

FrenchTart

FrenchTart

FrenchTart

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Joined
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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.
 
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 :)
 
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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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...
 
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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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
 
Can't go into too much detail but basically the venue we're using has been "abused" by another LAN group in the past so we've had to try and make the owner very happy with us and regard us as a professional group.

Personally, if people seem mature (and lets face it, we all know plenty of people way over 18 that AREN'T:p) I think we should try to accomodate them. Given the fact that two people have within a few minutes asked about it whilst being under 18 means that the rest of the organisers should be quite ameniable to changing the way things work.

Aside from things like dates, prices and venue, nothing is set in stone yet so my recommendation is to keep an eye on things :)

(and to be specific, we're having a meeting tomorrow about everything/the T&Cs for the event so if you provide contact details I'll happily keep you updated)
 
Update. Looks like 16 is going to be a new limit... Still sorting it for def though.

I can't see how to delete posts on here...odd.
 
Oof.... Seemed to have missed the replies to this for a while. Sorry about that!

GJUK

I'll check out the site. We often run/ran games at our houses. It gets rather cramped but it's really fun ;p Our most 'fun' event involved trying to git 12 people into a really small living room in the middle of summer. One of the guy's there had his PC almost literally melt. The processor was at about 79C before the PC refused to boot....

R3DBuLL

Yup, that's me... I'm hoping to try and get some of the Nastys along. It'd be cool if we could play loads of Q3 ;D

CDj-Rossi

I'm sure there will be lots of both ;) Personally don't play CS (either source or 1.6) but one of the other organisers is a big big CS player so he's setting up a tourny (with le prizes) and all. Looking into running a BF2 server, too - I've not played it in ages though, so I'll be easy pickings. ;p

Yup /re the location..I'm toying with the idea of having a 'curry run' at some point. Atm, I'm friendly with the local dominos people so I'm trying to organise a big discount with them...we'll see :)

The booking form should be online soon...in the meantime, feel free to spam the forum :p If you want us to run particular games, that's the place to slap us..er..I mean ask :)

Kreeeee

True enough though the odd random huge game can be fun (if rather silly). Trouble I have is that we have such a range of skills. I'm fairly good, as is one other person...about three other people range from alright to er...pretty awful (don't tell them I said that!) Still, if you're a serious player, you'll probably have an easy time of it if I'm honest. Nonetheless, I always enjoy learning how to play better and I'll give you a run for your money in any of my more specialised games ;)
 
Actually, we were discussing Trackmania/Nations yesterday as UV is a huge fun of the games. I think he's getting a server setup/idea of play done in the near future :)

Not played Sudden Strike 2... I'll have to give it a glance :)

What we should do is play a 4 player co-operative System Shock 2 game.. lol
 
We've just had an update /re the sleeping arrangments actually. Originally we were told that we could only use the main room (and we were planning on partitioning a bit of it for sleeping in)...however (and this is a GOOD however),we've now been told we can use the rec room in the barracks as a sleeping/rest area. Pretty rocking as it's a nice size room with lots of space for sleeping and tables and chairs for eating.

In /re to CS 1.6 and BF 2. We'll absolutely definitely have BF2 :) CS 1.6 might be more of a case of "you run a server and we'll play it" as the guy we have doing the CS:S stuff isn't quite so familiar with CS1.6 and running two CS tournys might be a bit much for some of our attendees. Still, hope the comprimise of a promise of BF2 is enough to tempt you ;p

If you check the website late tonight, I should've updated a load of the event details as we've had some pretty rocking developments recently.
 
That's really interesting actually - Vader mentioned this sort of thing and we definitely were quite interested in chatting to such people :)

I'll drop you an email later today.

Also, sounds interesting /re the company ;p

We do have space to expand in the TA centre near Rusholme. We measured things up and we could probably increase the places to around the 90mark...but we don't really want to do that until we know we'll fill them :) 50 seems an easy target to hit (given that we already personally know about 30 ppl interested) but if there's enough interest, we can definitely expand...

Anyhow, as I said, email on it's way soon :)
 
New website and booking system up :)

On a serious note /re sponsorship, does anyone know if OCUK has done that sort of thing before? I'm not the one dealing with the sponsorship for FragM but it'd be useful to know a bit of background so I can pass on info to the person that is :)
 
Anyone still interested in this? We've got 6 weeks to go before the event. 19 bookings so far so we've got enough to go ahead, but we could do with a few more ;)
 
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