2017 Mid-Summer LAN: A Recap

Our Mid-Summer LAN has come and gone. Battles were won and lost, and many a citizen rejoiced. We've had some time to recoup on sleep and lick our wounds and take a quick look back at how the LAN went.

Most LAN parties that we have ever attended or hosted usually play out the same way each time. a couple of people show up early and help setup. At opening time people slowly trickle in and about an hour after opening you get a large influx. You will get another couple of people show up from distant lands between 10pm and 2AM, with the dead hours being from 4-8AM then you will get another influx of folks who show up between 10AM and 12PM. That is the typical LAN... This was anything but!

We had the typical few guys come by early and help set up (BTW THANK YOU GUYS!) but just before opening people started to show up. It was a constant flow of people coming in with it being heaviest at 8PM. This continued until midnight! As a result of the influx of people and helping folks get set up with the low number of support staff we had at the time the schedule went out the window. This however didn't seem to dampen any spirits, and we were able to throw up several games with a high participation.

With regards to tournaments, We didn't have as many as we had planned, nor did we have as many prizes this time to give out. We did however have a very successful Overwatch tournament! With our winner being this young mans very first video game tournament.

He got to take home a DIY electronics kit consisting of an Arduino Uno, stackable headers, breadboard and wiring kit, and 2.5 Meters of addressable RGB LED lights with wiring connectors.

Other prizes including several awesome hard drive docks made by ICYDOCK were given out to game winners and LAN participants as prizes.

A couple of lucky guys got to walk away with some Pro micros and headers.

A huge thank you to our sponsor Sparkfun for the donation of the arduino and pro micros

There were very few issues that happened that weren't quickly remedied. We had 1 full and 1 partial network outage, the full being caused by some overly caffeinated kids tripping/unplugging the routers and servers. And the partial outage being caused by a network loop. Both issues were fixed in less than 5 minutes.

The worst issue was that the system that controls the AC for the building was set to go to sleep after normal business hours and it resides behind a locked door no one had the keys to. So for a couple of hours we had to use several fans to circulate some cold air in the room. Thankfully we were able to get a hold of maintenance to get the AC Working again.

Last issue had was the sleepy heads that stayed in bed until 11:30 on Saturday morning in the sleeping room. This was resolved by blasting some chicken techno over the speaker system.

Looking to the future, there are several things we are wanting to implement different. We are going to be working on a pre-pay system so you can purchase tickets ahead of time. We are constantly trying to improve so this will likely expand to things like drink and food preferences and orders, T-shirts (If you or anyone you know is a graphic artist and would like to help design shirts let us know!) etc.

We are going to try to reach more people to let them know about our events, as we still have folks who contact us saying "I wish i would have known about this before the event. I would have come!" Help us out, let your friends know about us. We now have our own Facebook Page separate from the Northwest Arkansas Gaming Group. And as always people can get the latest info here on our web page.

If you attended the LAN and have suggestions on how we can improve, please let us know! We have a quick 8 question survey you can fill out here

Over all any time we get folks together to play some games and have a good time, we consider it a success. As always we are looking to improve the experience and make it better. Even though we have just finished one LAN, the work is never really over, as we are gearing up for the next one.

As we increase our numbers, so increases our workload, and equipment needs. We are looking for individuals willing to volunteer to help out. We need folks willing to help set stuff up (requires getting there Friday morning to begin) and we need people willing to stick around after the LAN is finished to help breakdown.

In order to improve we will need the assistance of skilled techs. We need folks skilled with Web Development, specifically with web forms and IIS, individuals familiar with dedicated servers, configuring and operating them, and any programmers. See a follow up post after this one for details on upcoming projects and where you might be able to help. If you think any of this sounds good to you, reach out to us at info@afterlifelan.com .

Stay tuned for our next LAN! we are looking at sometime in late October early November.