How to host a Lan Party

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mrwiggles35

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Jun 10, 2010
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Whats up guy? I'm new to the Lan Party scene and i wanted to host one for me and my buddies. What will I need to host this event? Money isnt a huge problem but try to keep it on the low side. The Lan Party will have, most likely, <15 people.
 
The biggest problem I have had with lan problems is having enough desk space for everyone. Make sure you have enough tables and chairs. Sounds pretty obvious, but it is comfortable when you have people right ontop of one another. Also have a switch(s) and plenty of ethernet cable.
 
1. In house servers. Thats the whole point of a LAN right?? Source servers are pretty easy to set up. Counter Strike. Check out this guide: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNZE_yXzYRM

Games we run at our LAN:
Counter Strike Source
Call of Duty 4 regular
Call of Duty 4 GunGame
Left4Dead2
Unreal Tournament 3 <-----pain in the ass to setup!!
Blur (doesnt require a dedicated server, its all matchmaking, and the *cough* "acquired" *cough* version works over lan very well.

Theres guides out there to setup most of these. Its pretty easy, except for UT3.

2. Electric
With 15 people showing up to a LAN you have to take electric into consideration. If you're in a house you're talking 15amp circuits. I dont like to put more than two pcs & monitors on a circuit. You have to keep in mind the pc's people bring to these things require alot more electric than a normal every day PC. However some kitchens are wired on 20amp circuits so you might be able to squeeze an extra pc on there. That being said you can never have enough extension cords. If you're going over 50ft dont go with anything thinner than 12gauge.

3. Network
If you dont have dedicated servers then you will have to play on the internet. I never had a standard consumer grade router while doing this so I dont know how well it works. I've always ran a pfsense box and its always performed well. We always try to break it every time too. I had an older Pentium 2 based one that 4 of us broke easily, but since I switched to this new one it laughs are our feeble attempts.

If all you plan on doing is playing games then gigabit switches wont be needed, but I assume that everyone will want to be sharing files. They dont cost much more than fast ethernet so i'd just get the gig switches. We picked up a 8 port for $30. You can also never have enough patch cables.

4. Party stuff
Just like any other party gotta have the supplies. Lots of room, food, tables. With all those PC's it can get pretty hot too.

Thats all I can think of off the top of my head.
 
Aside from what has been mentioned, double check that you have enough power available. Verify how many amps each room has via the breaker panel. Be aware that the amps may night be marked correctly. So some how verify this. Creating a circuit map will be handy. You will lost likely need extension cords to pull power from random points in the house.

As long as you have the network running, that is the bulk of what is required by you. Attendees can bring their own chairs, cat5, power strips, etc.

If you do this on a regular basis, have then buy their own fold out table. Will save you from having to store them.
 
Thanks so much! :D I was thinking something along those lines but i just needed somebody to confirm for me.
 
The most I've had at a LAN was 19 PC's. It was a little hairy getting all the switches and power hooked up, but it worked out well. We were spread throughout the lower level of a house so cables were getting pretty long. We were playing BFvietnam running on a dedicated server.

Make sure you have enough drinks and food and you'll be set.

Have fun!
 
yep, we have one every 5-6 weeks north of philly in bucks county. smallish 6-8 people right now.
 
BurntToast said:
Aside from what has been mentioned, double check that you have enough power available. Verify how many amps each room has via the breaker panel. Be aware that the amps may night be marked correctly. So some how verify this. Creating a circuit map will be handy. You will lost likely need extension cords to pull power from random points in the house.

As long as you have the network running, that is the bulk of what is required by you. Attendees can bring their own chairs, cat5, power strips, etc.

If you do this on a regular basis, have then buy their own fold out table. Will save you from having to store them.
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this!! I have a lan party at my house once a month or so (4-8 people), and have learned to distribute power among 3-4 power circuits, also Deskspace! Trust me its easy to underestimate how much space is needed! (a lot of people don't consider that most people have big (20"+ Wide LCD's which can take up more room width wise than the old school CRTs)


Updated 2-3-11
I should mention that I do provide cat5/cat6 cabling, tables and chairs, and power cables, I also have at least one spare keyboard, mouse, mousepad, headset, and spare parts laying around as someone always forgets something or something gets damaged in transport..
 
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I am going to assume you have nothing.

You got the total amount of people you want in your LAN so that is a start.

The next most important this is POWER! like the guy that posted above check your circuit breakers and get extension cords to bring them to the room you want to LAN.

MAKE SURE TO BE A NAZI ABOUT THIS WHEN YOU LAN! I had some guy hook up after I told him where to plug in and we ended up popping a breaker and taking out a guys computer (not the same guy)

Next is table space.

Lowes is where you want to go, they have 6 foot plastic tables that are easy to move around but heavy duty enough to put up with crap stacked on them. Also if i remember right they are only 30 bucks. When I started my LAN parties I purchased 3 and used odds and ends to cover the rest as my 1st part was 3 people. I added a new table each LAN party.

So we got power, a place to stack your BAWLS and now you need seats. Two options, Home Depot (10 buck metal folding chairs) or if you got it Costco 13 dollar metal padded folding chairs. I went with the home depot folding chairs cause they are cheaper and indestructible. I only roll 2 people per table so my first purchase was 6 chairs and I added 2 chairs each LAN party.

Next is the network, gigabit is minimum. I went out and got some cheap dlink gigabit unmanaged switches, these will be upgraded in the future as they are not full backplane so they are not true gigabit. But they work for now.

Servers: I understand that LAN servers are cool but I have yet to get off my deadass to set one up. I do have fiber powered internet so I do not have issues with everyone going out on the net to play, but most of the time we run listen servers on the fastest rig.

I think that is all you really need to know, charge 5 bucks for food and make the LAN free until it starts filling up, then add another 5 bucks to off set the costs and or pay back investment.
 
I miss LAN gaming. I haven't been to one in probably a year and a half or more.
 
Bone_Enterprise said:
Fix your site fool, also it has been too long on both aspects of our LAN's we need to start again.
Click to expand...

Yeah, yeah yeah. I have been lazy and I need to buy 6 more 80 mm fans before my server has a meltdown! But a new LAN coming this 30th! My website will be up and running by tomorrow night.
 
Hardware wise you'll want a network switch capable of hosting enough LAN connections, you can dasiy chain several smaller ones, if you don't want to do all of the network settings (IP, DNS etc) by hand then the cheapest thing to do is plug your network into your internet router and borrow the DHCP service on that.

You'll only need a dedicated server with <15 people if there isn't anyone with a decent PC, if someone has a decent PC, like a quad core 4Gb+ then you'll be fine with non-dedicated servers.

Drink/snacks, we go mental here and come back from the corner store with silly amounts of booze and snacks, we're also in the habbit of making a chilli half way through the LAN to get some proper food in us when the junk food starts to get a bit much.

Non-PC gamings, we like to play card games near the end of the night when everyone is already pretty drunk, games like "shit head", "cheat", "up the river down the river" which when drunk is frequently bastardized to stuff like "Up the bumhole down the peeeeenis" (good times). We've also been known to play boardgames, the very old escape from colditz was good fun drunk.

Arrange some drinking rules to try and encourage healthy drinking games, you don't want just a few people getting wasted and throwing up everywhere, you want to encourage having to make the least drunk people having to drink more, usually old games of Call of Duty deathmatch or team deathmatch have "Drink when you kill" rules which gets you all very wasted and keeps it balanced as the drunk players become newbs and easy to kill and it evens the playingfield.

Don't be afraid to make up your own game modes/rules, you're all there for fun and sometimes making off the cuff rules which you all agree to can be a real laugh, one of our main FPS games is the original Call of Duty and we play TDM on Carentan the most, we've come up with "defend the house" where we defend a specific house and everyone is just constantly trying to take and hold this position. We also play another map which is in this large open field with a small destroyed house which has knee high walls, we put the 2 better players (me and my brother) on one team vs about 8 of our friends and again we have to defend this one little area, making the game a lot more fun.

Don't be afraid to go online and do server invasions (in small doses), we usually invent a fake clan tag like [Peeeenis]Frosty and all jump on one server, sometimes when kicking ass we get people requesting to be in the clan xD

Don't be afraid to play some more traditional games, we play PC variants of games like monopoly and risk during the day when things are more calm (before the drinking) and older games like bomberman make great tournament games. If you have fun games you want to play which have limited number of players like bomberman etc, then just turn them into tournaments where you take turns, preferably "drinking tournaments" :D
 
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