H2O Oh Malley said:
Just so you know.. start figuring out how you’re going to get every computer installed with the LAN games. TF2/L4D will be easy since they’re on the Steam LAN accounts. And also, factor in some install times for the tournaments while you’re trying to factor tournament length and settings.
For the record, this is why we’ve stuck with a lot of Steam games. They’re fairly popular, plus you don’t have to worry about getting multiple copies on every computer fast. Hence why the UT, CoD, and other non-Steam tournaments have been a severe pain in the *edited* for the staff in charge of setting and running those tournaments up.
Also… in my opinion (and since no one seems to have thought of this or bothered to have mentioned it), perhaps the PC side is dying for another reason. Lack of community. I believe it will be proven if you guys still choose to “try new games” to see if it’ll fix anything. The PC community has looked fairly weak in comparison to the console side because of the difference in community strengths. I haven’t seen much of an effort from the PC side to go out and do things together as a collective group to encourage camaraderie and laid the foundation of a solid community. That’s what I did for the console side on the get go, and I credit that to being the primary contributor in why the console side exploded in size and continued to grow even after I stepped aside as the lead proponent.
Just throwing this out there, but it’s something for you to try. Try to organize some get-together events with your PC peeps. It may not be playing games, but movie nights, going out to eat, just hanging out, or whatever, should help start building the foundation needed to rebuild.
Sounds like he’s got some good ideas there…. but yeah with the lan go ahead and figure in some leeway time for things to go wrong or take a lot longer than they should… because it WILL happen. The best thing you can do is to start preparing for it.. get all the server configs together and test all of them now and about a week before the lan.