Event: Jaguar LAN - LAN Party Event Date: 4/09/2004 Written By: GotNoRice Date Written: ??/??/2004

When I first heard about the LANparty, I wasn’t sure what to expect. I’ve known about JLF for quite some time, but they always seemed to throw the smaller “close-knit community” style LANs rather than the larger ones that allow me to justify the drive up to Sacramento. This LAN was also of particular interest to me because as a staff member at LANtrocity, we held LAN parties at this very same building and, well, the building had its fair share of issues. I thought it would be interesting to see how things worked out.

Placer county fairgrounds is actually a collection of buildings, many of which are capable of holding a LANparty. There is one building, though, that is far larger than the others, and because the specific building wasn’t listed on the JLF page (or if it was, it didn’t catch mine or most other’s eye) I just assumed it was in the larger building. When I pulled up to it, the fence to the parking lot was locked and all the lights were off. It became pretty obvious at that point that it wasn’t in that building, so we turned around and drove over to the far other side of the fairgrounds. Even though I knew how to get there, it was still a little foggy being it had been a few years. You have to go down one road, turn in to the parking lot for the National Guard station, go through the parking lot, through the fairgrounds, and finally you come upon the building where there was parking on the dirt along side the building. I can’t imagine how I would ever have found the place if I hadn’t already known how to get there. At one point, someone who was trying to tell their friend how to get there over the cell phone had to resort to activating one of the strobe lights on his truck and using it as a homing beacon for his friend. They did eventually put a sign up, but not after several people had already gotten lost.

Quite a few people ended up showing on Friday night, far more than I would have expected. Soon afterward, the games started. UT2004, FarCry, and the Splinter Cell sequel seemed to be the biggest hits, though some Call of Duty, Counter-strike, and a little bit of Battlefield: Vietnam was also played. I was a little bummed that there wasn’t any DesertCombat played, but I had a blast playing the full version of UT2004 for the first time (I had only previously played the Demo). The food was pretty good also, consisting mainly of pizza, breadsticks, and assorted chips and soda that people brought. I’m not sure you could have asked for better LANparty food. We played late into the night and early into the morning. I used to think the prospect of going to a multi-day LAN and staying up the entire time was appealing, but experience has told me that a tired gamer doesn’t have much fun. I went and crashed in the back of my Van and by the time I woke up, most of the people who were coming on Saturday had finally gotten there.

The LAN was an interesting and fun combination of familiar faces, new faces, and people I hadn’t seen since last year. Although there were no tournaments or anything, there were plenty of people in the few popular games that were played. As the LAN went on, you could see that the people who stayed up all night were fading fast. Toward the end, most people looked like zombies. Around 6pm, they did the raffle drawings. They gave away a Pentium 4 Extreme Edition, a power supply, and a few mouse pads. They then announced the winners of the Tag line contest. This caught me and many others by surprise, as we hadn’t heard much about this contest. I had read briefly about it, but assumed it was something that was going on at the LAN. I guess it was our fault for not reading the details on the main page thoroughly enough, but you would think that considering they were giving away almost $3000 worth of prizes (Three P4 3.2EE’s) in that contest they would have hyped it up a little bit more. After the contests were over, lots of people (most tired from being up all night) left, including my brother and I.

I was glad to see that the LAN went off pretty much without a hitch. The building didn’t seem to have had any power enhancements in the years since we had a LAN there, but by keeping the MAX number of registrations low and bringing in power from other places they were able to make it work. There were also a disproportionate number of Laptop gamers there, which may have helped. Toward the end, my brother’s monitor started flipping out and eventually died. He was able to use my laptop to continue gaming, but regardless, the loss of a 21” monitor sucks. We also forgot to bring a powerstrip, but someone there was nice enough to loan us one.

Although the LAN went very well overall, there was still one issue that kept it from being one of the best. The network, while stable and reliable, was just plain slow. From what I could tell it looked like it was all run off one large Cisco switch. There is nothing wrong with having the majority of the people on 100mbit, but when the file servers and the few people who share a lot of files are on 100mbit also, and you have multiple people pulling off them, you end up with more like 10mbit speeds, and even virtual traffic jam situations where due to each individual transfer taking so long to complete, the number of average simultaneous transfers goes way up and even starts to affect ping in games or game issues if it’s running off the same hard drive the shared files are on. It’s been so long since I had been to a LAN without any gigabit that I had almost forgotten how bad it was, but next time I’ll bring my Dual port adapter and if nothing else having the 2nd 100mbit connection should help things a bit. I guess this was only really an issue for those of us who transfer a lot of files, but it did make a few things take quite a lot longer than they really should have.

I enjoyed the LAN, and if they choose to keep doing larger events, I hope to go again. For their biggest LAN in recent memory, it was pretty darn well done, and for that they have my thanks and my congratulations.