FITES 200 - February 25th-27th 2011 Mechanicsburg PA

ZX2Slow

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Be a part of Central Pennsylvania’s largest LAN party ever! Frag with
friends, neighbors, and strangers alike. The fun begins early and ends
late as we frag the day away! This year's event includes even more
space than last year, an improved console gaming section, tournaments,
open servers out the wazoo, prizes, and just plain fun! Join FITES
and kick some fraggin’ booty all weekend long!

Never been to a LAN party? Now is your chance to see what all the
fuss is about! Check out our website for details!

***Online registration closes on Wednesday February 23rd!***
PrePay now! We sold out the last 4 years and had to turn people away.

2011 Fites 200+ Man LAN

http://www.fites.net

Start: February 25th, 2011 6pm
End: February 27th, 2011 10am

Where:
Holiday Inn
HARRISBURG-WEST
5401 CARLISLE PIKE
MECHANICSBURG, PA 17050
Tel: 1-717-697-0321

Cost:
Online*: $45
Online*: $40 for 5 or more
At the Door: $60 (If seats are available.)

Each paid seat is limited to one gaming device(PC, Xbox, PS3, Intellivision) and monitor. Multiple monitors require multiple seats. No exceptions. This is for both space and electricity reasons.

Age Limit: 13+

* We are unable to offer refunds unless then event is canceled, however your seat is transferable.
* Seating will be reserved via FITES online registration system (if you want to sit with friends, register and pay quickly to secure a group of seats close to one another!)
* There will be two significant (5-7 hours) time periods in the middle of the event that will be reserved only for open play. This is to allow those who are staying at the hotel, a chance to sleep without missing any tournaments.

Registration, Payment and Seat Selection Process:
* Create/Log in to your FITES forum account.
* Purchase the number of tickets you need in the store.
* Once payment has been received and accepted, you will receive forum private message containing the details of your order, including a code and a link to download your ticket(s) which will be in PDF form. (Tickets will be four to a page.) Your ticket will be REQUIRED to enter the event!
* Go to http://intranet.fites.net and create an account for each seat you have paid for using the code from your purchase. Reuse the same code for each seat. For example if you and 4 friends purchased 5 tickets together give each person the SAME code to register their account.
* Once you have created your account reserve your seat via the "map" link on the top menu bar. Note: You can change your seat for another (given that it's unoccupied) at anytime before the event on the same page.

*Note: Seating is expected to fill up fast, so if you want to guarantee your ability to sit near friends, sign up and pay quickly!

If you have any issues or concerns please reach out to us on the support form or @ [email protected]!

EDIT/Update!


PC Tournaments have been posted!
Console tournament list is still being finalized.

Please see http://intranet.fites.net/tournaments.php for details (maplistings/server config/rules)

Call of Duty 4 5v5 Search And Destroy Hardcore

Counter-Strike: Source 5v5 Bomb Defusal

Left 4 Dead 2 5v5 Survival Scavenge

Unreal Tournament 2004

UT3 5v5 CTF Tournament


Bonus note!

Many of us know how frustrating it can be when hunger interrupts your gaming. Getting up going out in the cold to get food takes valuable gaming time and, well, the cold just sucks. This wont be a problem at the 200 man. The FITES 200 has you covered with Lunch and Dinner available on Saturday at a reasonable price, without having to leave the venue.

Pricing: $5

Menu Options:
1. Pizza (cheese or pepperoni), chips and soda or water
2. Chicken Fingers, chips and soda or water
3. Cold Cut Sandwich, chips and soda or water

Lunch Service Times: 12:00pm – 1:30pm
Dinner Service Times: 5:00pm – 7:00pm
 
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We still have 10% off coupons available. We also have group discounts available. See the registration page for details.

We are finalizing the tournaments, we will have plenty of free play servers available throughout the event. We will be announcing details shortly.
 
I know I've bothered you guys a few times on your board, and i know that an in house BC2 server is out of the question.

We gotta be able to work some networking magic to get an internet hosted server/tournament there. I rent a server and I'd give it to fites for the weekend.

This is the perfect site to extract the networking magic. Tons of smart people in the Networking Sub-forum. Its probably the best subform on this entire board. I'll even start the thread :D QoS through the pfsense FITES uses its completely doable.

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE check it out!
 
We also rent a server, we play BC2 on Fri/Sat usually, join us on intranet.fites.net.

We are making arrangements for a BC2 server to be used exclusively by our LAN attendees. You are welcome to play as much BC2 at the LAN you want. As with any game that has no LAN support we cannot guarantee that things will go smoothly, therefore we cannot have an official tournament without the ability to ensure the quality of service to the participants.

We have contacted EA, DICE, gameservers.net, they do not provide servers for LAN parties. Any internet connection shared among 200+ gamers is going to be absolutely clobbered. We are still looking into BC2 (SC2 too) but until we can guarantee things we will not be able to have an official tournament.
 
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When we were at the LAN back in July (?) playing BC2 online was next to impossible until later in the day. I spoke with Czar briefly last night and told him that our local gaming "clan/group" will donate our server for the weekend as well if yours fills up.

With some good QoS setup on the pfsense that you run, and if the cisco switches (i didnt catch what model they where) you use also support it, an internet server is do-able. Luckily there are tons of pfsense guru's on this site, including myself. (I've been tossing around the idea of a Quad Core 2GB ram pfsense the past few months... why? cuz i can :D) Our internet BC2 server is based in NY and the ping from here (philly area) is always <25.
 
I really must reiterate.

As with any game that has no LAN support we cannot guarantee that things will go smoothly, therefore we cannot have an official tournament without the ability to ensure the quality of service to the participants.

We have tried several QoS settings at our last LAN and those settings failed to improve the quality of connection to a public server...it actually made it worse.

We will have a dedicated server available for play but we will NOT, I repeat WILL NOT have a BC2 tournament.
 
Mr Deception

I would imagine that the people on this forum who are trained and have many years of experience in these types of situations and environments would love for a chance to help you improve the quality of your network if you shared a few details about your infrastructure. I for one believe that with the proper hardware, settings, lightly enforced onsite rules, and a little planning, this can be achieved.

If I were fites I would start thinking ahead. Dedicated servers are becoming a thing of the past. Will you honestly be only hosting Source games in the coming years? They seem to be the only games with dedicated servers these days. Which really sucks.
 
As the infrastucture dude for FITES and longest continuously serving staff member, I truly feel compelled to reply here. There really is not much more to say that has not already been said on our own forums. For those that wish to read and understand what has been said, some of the details of our infrastructure, as well as our reasoning for not holding a FITES sanctioned tournament for BFBC2, please see the following thread on our forum, started by jma, aka jadams in September:

http://www.fites.net/general-discussion/any-change-of-a-bc2-server-in-feb's-lan/

In particular, please note my own responses there detailing our setup and reasoning at:

http://www.fites.net/general-discussion/any-change-of-a-bc2-server-in-feb's-lan/msg60172/#msg60172

and

http://www.fites.net/general-discussion/any-change-of-a-bc2-server-in-feb's-lan/msg60220/#msg60220

We've been running large scale LAN's like this since 2004 and we have a pretty good sense of what works, what doesn't, what makes gamers happy, and what makes them frustrated. The general forum-goer does not see what the staff goes through to prepare for these LAN's every year. We don't just throw it together in the weeks before the LAN; in fact with the exception of a few months following these LAN's, we at least discuss ideas for the next LAN year-round. We could throw up servers for every game imaginable and try to accommodate every single person's requests, but the reality is that that does not make for a good LAN experience. If you have 200 people with 100 different games going, what fun is it to have 2 people in each game? Or from another angle, what reward do you get out of the work to have 100 games going if 90% of the servers sit empty and therefore other aspects of the LAN suffer because you killed yourself trying to accommodate the individual requests of everyone? My point is:

sully said:
you can guarantee if it's only half-assed, we won't do it. FITES has always strived to be the best...

If you want to run your own side-tourney at the LAN, be our guest. We encourage it. We accommodate it with our open-play server system at http://intranet.fites.net/gamerequest.php. But because we can't guarantee that a) The bandwidth/latency will be acceptable during a tournament, and b) that BFBC2 will work properly with so many people coming from the same IP, we will NOT, under ANY circumstances, sign our name to an official BFBC2 tournament.

In closing, please let's end discussion on this topic in this thread. If you'd like to continue, please utilize our own forums at http://www.fites.net/fites-feedback/.

Thank you for listening/reading.
 
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I believe it will be the same setup as last year, 10/100Mb ports at the table with trunked gigabit uplinks back to the main switch.
 
Internet will be provided by Comcast at the 105/10 tier:

49647782.png
 
Sully213: Do want.

Also, what are ae going to need that speed internets for at a LAN? o_o
 
We don't really need that much Internet speed for a LAN, but it's not costing us anything, so why not? Inevitably, someone will need a patch that we don't have on our local patch server and have to get it from the Internet. Oooorrrrr, as we've seen plenty in the past, people buy games on Steam while at the LAN, or choose not to install their previously purchased Steam games until they get to the LAN and that will eat up plenty of bandwidth.

As you can see from the traffic graph from last year's event, if you provide it, people will use it :)
 
Steam games are easily backed up, which can then be distributed from your local server, and deployed to peoples pc's over the lan. We do this at our local lan all the time. Perhaps the most popular ones can be added to your patch server?
 
Can we pay extra if we get bored and want to play WOW?? LOL

I'm hoping that later at night after people doze off that the internet will provide good enough pings to get some sort of internet server play in. I'll surely be going through BC2 withdrawl by saturday night.
 
Steam games are easily backed up, which can then be distributed from your local server, and deployed to peoples pc's over the lan. We do this at our local lan all the time. Perhaps the most popular ones can be added to your patch server?

Yes, I know, but you can never be sure to have everything that everyone will possibly need stored locally. Not to mention the complications of keeping your backed up copies on a file server current in the run-up to the LAN. That's why for things like this, we also provide a DC++ server so if your friend has a game you need to install and you want to grab the files from his Steam directory (or someone else at the LAN), you can share those files on DC++ and BAM! Problem solved.
 
Yea that works too. I just hope people utilize resources on the LAN rather than the internet. People who torrent should be KOS'd, literally! I have a hard time believing you cant find what you need from 200 people.
 
Steam games are easily backed up, which can then be distributed from your local server, and deployed to peoples pc's over the lan. We do this at our local lan all the time. Perhaps the most popular ones can be added to your patch server?

10/100 the the tables...
unless people can use their own gigabit switches, steam games and large patches are going to take forever to transfer.
 
If something is available via file transfer over the LAN its only logical to get it that way than through the internet. Even with a 100Mb+ with 200 people the speeds will be slower. Plus theres these things called USB & DVD, which our group used many times to transfer files last year.
 
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that would be cool. criccio and I are at the middle table along with some other local friends, the ones with the >:O clan tag.
 
did something change with the seating chart that our clan tags are no longer displayed??
 
Updated the original post with news/details!

PC Tournaments have been posted!
Console tournament list is still being finalized.

Please see http://intranet.fites.net/tournaments.php for details (maplistings/server config/rules)

Call of Duty 4 5v5 Search And Destroy Hardcore

Counter-Strike: Source 5v5 Bomb Defusal

Left 4 Dead 2 5v5 Survival Scavenge

Unreal Tournament 2004

UT3 5v5 CTF Tournament

Bonus note!

Many of us know how frustrating it can be when hunger interrupts your gaming. Getting up going out in the cold to get food takes valuable gaming time and, well, the cold just sucks. This wont be a problem at the 200 man. The FITES 200 has you covered with Lunch and Dinner available on Saturday at a reasonable price, without having to leave the venue.

Pricing: $5

Menu Options:
1. Pizza (cheese or pepperoni), chips and soda or water
2. Chicken Fingers, chips and soda or water
3. Cold Cut Sandwich, chips and soda or water

Lunch Service Times: 12:00pm – 1:30pm
Dinner Service Times: 5:00pm – 7:00pm
 
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If you want to sit together please grab a seat within the next week or two, and be sure to reserve your seat on the event page. Also if anyone buys their seats in bulk there are discounts for groups of five or above.

The month before the LAN we get the bulk of our sign ups and blocks of seats will be taken up fast.
 
Rathe sat down right smack dab in the middle of our group. We're being chaperoned!! haha!

The one you really gotta watch out for is that dude chr0n0phage. Its almost guaranteed hes gonna come back from the Hardware Bar (if its still called that) all shitfaced stumbling around knocking over peoples computers.



I kid....kind of.
 
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