Event:Monsterfrag 4- LAN Party Event Date: 7/10/04 Written By: Warhawk Date Written:

Monsterfrag 4: BEST LAN EVAR, or totally PIN? You decide...

When the announcement was made that the next Monsterfrag lan was going to be an epic 500 person gaming extravaganza, I think everyone was pretty excited. Not only that, but this one was touted as the "California Gaming Championships" with literally thousands of dollars in cash and prizes being up for grabs. Sure, it sounded really ambitious, but from previous experience with monsterfrag I had faith that the Monsterfrag Admin's, MorFeus, Wireballz and Layer_III were up to the task.

We were all kept in suspense as to where the location was, and a few weeks before the event it was finally announced. The Crown Plaza Hotel near San Francisco looked to be a great location for such an event. Registrations weren't quite as numerous as hoped, with the registration list topping out at under 200. That was to be expected though, as this was probably the largest lan ever attempted in recent northern california history. These things take a little time to grow, and given the success of past Monsterfrag events, this one was only expected to get bigger in the future.

Almost all of the active TMC members were registered and ready to go. A lot of our good friends were going to be there as well, including JonDoms, and [DP]Fill. I brought along my friend Ashley from school and we all trekked out to the outer reaches of San Francisco / Burlingame for what was to be the biggest california LAN around.

Granted, none of us did much practicing for any of the tournaments, but we were still ready to go and get some massive lanning action going. The MF admins were extra cool and gave us the VIP treatment, and let us in early to setup our stuff before the mobs waiting outside the door were let in. We also got plenty of table space reserved for us, which was nice. The only downside was we had to wait in the back of the check in and pay line.

When I first walked into the main conference room where the event was going to be held, I looked around and saw [TMC]Dima and a few other TMC members helping the admins crimp network cables. "It's 20 minutes before the lan starts and they haven't even finished crimping all the network cables?" I thought to myself, and hoped it wasn't a harbinger of things to come. Unfortunately it turned out to be quite the harbinger, in fact, not just any harbinger, but a harbinger of epic proportions... the Mother of All Harbingers, and by that I mean that things sort of went downhill from there.

Almost as soon as everyone was setup the games were beginning to form, servers came to life, games were joined, the DJ was pumping out the jams and the excitement and momentum of the lan began to build. It was shaping up to be another great Monsterfrag event.

Then, suddenly and without warning, the entire lan got hit with rolling blackouts as random tables began to lose power. This was problem was compounded as gamers, frantic for more power, began switching their tables to other sources of power, which overloaded other circuits, which caused those gamers to plug into different outlets, which brought down more power.. etc. etc. It soon became obvious that new circuits needed to be brought in, or we would be playing musical blackouts all night long. Unfortunately there were no spare extension cords to be had. Luckily [TMC]Dotmatrix came to the rescue and went out and bought a large quantity of extension cords, and other power related items. For this brave act, Dotmatrix truly was the hero of Monsterfrag 4.

These power cables went a long way in resolving the power issues, but there were still a few tables that were having trouble. Unfortunately for some, the iceberg had already struck, and they were abandoning ship as fast as possible. Whole tables began to pack up and go home. If nothing else, this helped ease the load on the power.

Meanwhile, there was a little bit of trouble on the network front as well, but not nearly to the scale of the power issues. It seemed the gremlins had definitely invaded this lan, but the Monsterfrag admins worked tirelessly to drive them all away.

I took advantage of the downtime to get up and take a look around. There were a lot of people there that I knew from previous lans, as well as a lot of new faces. There were some reps from PC Gamer who had setup a table. Surprisingly, they didn't stick around to play any games, but they were really nice guys and were happy to hang out and talk with us.

Throughout the LAN there was a camera crew roaming around, covering the lan and interviewing people. They interviewed me at one point, which was a lot of fun. They had a good looking female with them that was doing the interviews and giving out prizes for the raffles. Speaking of the raffles, this MF had some nice prizes. While most of them were small case mod prizes like LED Fans (or as the obviously non-computer literate female announcer calls them: Lead Fans). The best prizes to be had were high end nvidia based video cards, and of course the cash prizes that were given to the winning teams of the tournaments.

Even though the technical difficulties put a damper on the festivities, half the fun of lans is meeting cool people, and there were definitely a lot of cool people at this one. In fact, that was the saving grace of this otherwise technically plagued LAN. It really is hard to not have fun with so many friends and cool people to hang out with. I am confident that the MF admins will have all the bugs ironed out ahead of time for the next one, and it'll be even bigger and better.