Hey guys!
It was a great LAN as usual and it felt like the best one we've been to. I really think that is because we skipped competing in the Dota 2 tournament this time. Don't get me wrong, playing the Dota 2 tourney is great but you just miss out on so much when you're in Dota 2 all night. Maybe that just comes down to personal preference but playing in some of the smaller comps with lots of different people was great.
Of course, I have to mention our seating arrangement was buggered up because on the excel spreadsheet we had only been assigned 5+5 instead of 6+6 seats and then a group got placed overlapping on one seat we were supposed to have. I know it's something I could have spotted before we rocked up to the LAN but I did not pay enough attention to that small detail. Thank you to Zardoz and the other people who helped move another table in. Especially StoicWilly who relocated at our personal request so he wasn't in the middle of our group.
I wanna mention the CS:GG comp was pretty awful. For starters, the actual mod being used isn't even the standard one that everyone plays online. Rounds instead of deathmatch, collision on and starting with glock instead of awp. The actual running of the comp was pretty horrible too. Sure, there were server issues but that was dealt with well. I'm talking about having someone say over the mic they'll let us know when the servers are live and sometime later the server restarts and a couple of rounds in it is said the servers are now live. You just can't call the servers live if they have been running before any period of time without a restart.
Now that I mention it, I recall being in the UT2K4 IG server with a mic announcement saying that we're gonna go live soon and having that restart a few minutes later without another announcement. If this is the format by how it's going to be run then at the very least the announcements should be more specific so people know what's going on. If it's not possible to sync the announcements up with the live restarting then it should be properly said 'If you are in Game X Server Y then we will be going LIVE after NEXT server restart.'
It didn't make too much of a difference for me personally but I think on principle competitors should be aware of when they're going live. The safe bet would be to treat every server restart like it's live but then you're more likely to miss out on announcements due to concentrating. The big catch with CS:GG was that the mod wasn't the standard gungame we all know and I thought the server restart was an attempt to put the correct mod on which had failed.
I still believe playing in numerous smaller competitions was great fun and I'm gonna try compete in more of them next time. Oh, I really liked the competitions time-thing on the projector screen too but you guys removed a bunch of details that are usually up on there. I do recall you had to give an announcement regarding
http://respawn.lan versus this website for the people who didn't know about it! Maybe if it's possible use it for pizza and BBQ as well so people don't miss out on that! I got myself organised properly this but there's nothing worse than hearing 'The payments for X have closed.' That reminds me, I was in a goddamn competition and someone threatened to eat the last meat lovers pizza which had not been claimed yet. I fucking HATE it when people threaten to eat my food. Don't you fucking dare. I had to get one of my mates, who was also in game, but not in a competition to go up and collect it for me. Let's not forget that meat lovers arrived later on, ya know, after the competitions had booted up again.
Alright, I'm done writing stuff. It was a great LAN as usual even with a few hiccups. Hope some of them smooth out for next time.