LANified! 9: Batter Up Calgary Jun 4-5 2011

[BloodyIron]

LANified! brings you another fantastic event, with three tournaments (with up to $1100 in prizing!) and plenty of casual gaming. Batter Up, LANified!'s ninth event, runs from Saturday June 4th 2011 (10am) till Sunday June 5th 2011 (6pm). We will be again broadcasting the event and tournaments LIVE to the world! This event is again a BYOC event (Bring Your Own Computer), in which participants are welcome to enter any of the tournaments we will be running. As with previous events we will be having an on-site concession featuring fresh hot food as well as drinks and snacks.

The Broadcasting and Tournament schedule are not yet announced, but they will likely be along the same lines as previous events.

We will be running the following tournaments:
-Heroes of Newerth, 3v3
-Team Fortress 2, 3v3
-Starcraft 2, 1v1

We run a professional-grade power infrastructure and full gigabit network. Internet will be provided on site, and we also provide a public Mumble VoIP server ( voice.lanified.com default port) to anyone who can make use of it.

Alcohol is allowed on site, considering this ID is required for every attendee. Minors are still welcome, but they are not allowed to consume Alcohol.

For full details please check out the event information at: LANified!. If you would like to follow our events we can be found on http://facebook.lanified.com. And if you like what you see, why not prepay today?

 

[BloodyIron]

Good news everyone. S2 Games will be sponsoring us again. As such our prizing is going to be up to $1100! Thanks a lot S2.

For those unfamiliar with S2 games, they have made titles such as Savage 1 and 2, and Heroes of newerth! The Savage series is now a free-to-play game. Check their site out at: http://www.s2games.com/

 

[BloodyIron]

Well it's been a while since our last update, but things are still developing as we approach our coming event.


First off we now have a public TF2 server for everyone to enjoy. To join us on it just connect to tf2b.lanified.com . Yes we are working on a tf2a server also. This joins our other public servers, our mumble server at voice.lanified.com and our minecraft server at mine.lanified.com .


Second we put together a poster that we're going to be putting up all over. It comes in two flavors

PDF: http://www.lanified.com/downloads/LANified!_9_Jun_4-5_2011.pdf

PNG: http://www.lanified.com/downloads/LANified!_9_Jun_4-5_2011.png


Third we put together a recap of our past event, to check it out head to: http://www.lanified.com/news/details/140



Our coming event is just over 2 months away and we can't wait to put the show on. Head to the site to sign-up and join us.

 

[BloodyIron]

It is now two months till our next event. There are some changes we would like to outline as well as some other bits:


Starcraft 2:


Tournament Format:

The tournament format will no longer be double elimination, we will move to a slightly more complex format but one with better results. It will be broken down into stages.

Stage 1:

Entrants will be broken down into groups of 6. Each group of 6 will face off in a round-robin format series. The top 2 entrants from each group of 6 will proceed to Stage 2. If the number of entrants in this stage is not divisible by 6 what the extra entrants will do will be based on how many there are. If there are 3 OR LESS extra entrants the top ranked entrants (based on ladder ranking) will be swapped into these extra slots and get a buy into Stage 2. If there are 4 OR MORE extra entrants the group will play in a round-robin format series, again with the top 2 entrants proceeding to Stage 2. Map picks will be agreed upon by both entrants at this stage, if no map is agreed upon it will be chosen at random by a tournament administrator.

Stage 2:

The remaining entrants will face off in a single-elimination tournament bracket, each match will consists of a bo3 series. To clarify, when you face an entrant in this stage you will play against them in a bo3 (Best Of 3) series. The maps will be determined when you are matched up. First pick will be determined by a coin toss (or equivalent), and then picks will alternate. To clarify, the coin toss winner gets pick, then the other entrant picks the second map, then the coin toss winner picks the third map.

This bracket will continue until we have 2 entrants left, they shall proceed to Stage 3.

Stage 3:

The finalists will face-off in a Bo5 (Best Of 5) series. Each entrant will be able to veto 1 map. First pick will be determined by a coin toss (or equivalent). Picks hereafter shall be chosen by the loser of the previous game.


The reason we have decided to move to this format is it provides more games to those who may be eliminated earlier in the tournament. Each player in the groups of 6 in Stage 1 will be guaranteed 5 games played. It also simplifies our structure as we had some minor problems in the past with confusion about who does what, and when. This change should not significantly affect scheduling even if we reach capacity. At this time we do not offer any seeding in our tournaments but are looking to implement such in future events.


Maps:

Blizzard has changed the 1v1 ladder map list since we last reviewed our map selection. As such we are adjusting to match parity with the current ladder. The map list is as follows:

-Scrap Station (2)
-Xel'Naga Caverns (2)
-Backwater Gulch (4)
-Delta Quadrant (4)
-Metalopolis (4)
-Shakuras Plateau (4)
-Slag Pits (4)
-Tal'darim Altar LE (4)
-The Shattered Temple (4)
-Typhoon Peaks (4)

We welcome discussion on this list. The primary reason we give preference to parity with the ladder is so that players can reliably get practice on these maps. We may revise this list as the event approaches.



LANified! NETworks is growing:

At our last event we launched a new service from LANified!: LANified! NETworks. Since then it has been very well received and going forward we are expanding our services provided and quality. As such we are looking for some talented individuals who think they can step up to the plate to help us with commentating and other related tasks. If you are enthusiastic about competitive gaming and have the insight into such competition we ask that you email bloodyiron at shaw dot ca to apply. This is a volunteer position. If you find yourself hesitant to apply we ask that you DO apply instead of not applying.



Previous events:

If you were unfortunate enough to miss our previous events, we have time-lapse video footage of them. Not all of them, but our last two are as follows:

LANified! 7: YouTube - LANified! 7 - Fall 2010 - Calgary Canada - Timelapse

LANified! 8: YouTube - LANified! 8 - Winter 2011 - Calgary Canada - Timelapse



Pledging and signup clarification:

There are a few things we want to clarify and remind our valued attendees about. First off, on our site, creating an account is not signing up for the event, you need to sign up for the specific event you want to attend once you are logged in. This is so that it is easier for you in the future for you to sign up as you will use the same account. Second off, if you are planning to prepay or have already prepaid we want to remind you to pledge for the tournaments you want to enter. Pledging unlocks higher prize pools and shows us reliable numbers on how many people are interested in which tournaments.



Early-bird Prepaying:

We also want to remind everyone that there is only one month left to take advantage of our early-bird prepayment pricing. If you are looking to prepay we recommend that you take advantage of this.



LANified! 4 years and stronger than ever!:

It came to our attention not too long ago that we missed our own anniversary! It turns out (according to the waybackmachine) that we're now 4 years old! If you want to see what our earlier site looked like, you can check it out at: LANified! - Welcome

4 years is a long time, and we've had plenty of it to reflect on where we are going forward. As such we have large plans in stock to improve our offerings and expand. We are greatly looking forward to the next 4+ years and are glad you are here to enjoy it with us.

 

[BloodyIron]

Good news everyone!

This coming Wednesday (Apr 27th 2011) we will be hosting a LIVE Starcraft 2 King of the Hill event!

This event will be online only and we will be broadcasting each and every match as they happen in beautiful 720p with living breathing commentators. It will be a first-come-first-served sort of event in that the first two people ready will play and the first person ready after the match will face the winner. This is strictly a for-fun event.

To clarify on somethings:
-If you lose you cannot re-enter the event as a contestant
-If you win a match you stay in to face the next eligible contestant
-The new contestant picks the map
-Map list is TBA, but will likely follow closely to the 1v1 ladder map list
-You must be in the "LANified!" Starcraft 2 chat channel to enter
-Outcomes of disconnects/computer problems will be decided on a case-by-case basis
-Eligible contestants will bed invited to the appropriate game
-These rules may change at a later date


The event will start at 4pm MST (GMT-7) and will go till 9pm MST (GMT-7). We will have a one hour break from 6pm MST to 7pm MST, upon which the event will resume.

To watch the event head to http://www.lanified.com/networks during our scheduled event times.

Hope to see you there!

 

[BloodyIron]

This week we will be broadcasting once again, Our schedule is as follows:


Wednesday: 5pm - 9pm MST (GMT-7): Starcraft 2 King of the Hill

We are hosting another King of the Hill event for Starcraft 2, open to any player in North America. To participate simply enter the LANified! channel, and be ready in time for our broadcast. The rules are:
-If you lose you cannot re-enter the event as a contestant for that day
-If you win a match you stay in to face the next eligible contestant
-The new contestant picks the map
-You must be in the "LANified!" Starcraft 2 chat channel to participate
-Outcomes of disconnects/computer problems will be decided on a case-by-case basis
-Eligible contestants will be invited to the appropriate game
-These rules may change at a later date

The map list is:
-Scrap Station
-Xel'Naga Caverns
-Backwater Gulch
-Delta Quadrant
-Metalopolis
-Shakuras Plateau
-Slag Pits
-Tal'darim Altar LE
-The Shattered Temple
-Typhon Peaks


Thursday: 5pm - 9pm MST (GMT-7): Minecraft King of the Hill

We are hosting a brand new King of the Hill event featuring Minecraft pvp. The rules and format are not yet finalized, but this is welcome to anyone. The rules will probably fall along the same lines of the Starcraft 2 KotH. Do not worry, we havn't forgotten about our build fest world, but we are re-working the format for it, it's fair to expect it to return in some fashion. We will present how to join this event during the broadcast, or earlier if possible on our site. So keep checking back to our site for updates.

To watch our broadcasts LIVE! head to http://www.lanified.com/networks



As for our coming LANified! 9: Batter Up event, there are some things we want to cover.


First, in terms of pledging prizing unlocks. As you may know the prizing increases as enough people pledge for particular tournaments (you pledge on the page for the specific event in-case you didn't). However something we can't present nicely just yet is that when these new prize pools unlock they will not just go to the first place contestant, but they will be split between first and second place. To elaborate:

For Starcraft 2 the step up prize pool will be:
1st place: $220
2nd place: $100

For Team Fortress 2 the step up prize pool will be:
1st place: $210
2nd place: $90


Second, our early-bird prepay will be ending midnight Friday night of this week. To clarify it ends 00:01 Saturday May 7th 2011. Currently our prepay is $40, but afterwards the prepay will bump up to $50. We will still be taking prepayments after this point. As such we recommend that you take advantage of the early-bird pricing while it's still available! If you are having difficulties with any step of the way, give us a shout on the forums and we'll work our hardest to help you with whatever problems you may have.


Third, we've been putting up quite a few posters, and are constantly looking for new locations, but we sometimes miss good locations. Do you know of some worthwhile locations? Let us know! Post on our facebook page: http://facebook.lanified.com or on our forums: http://www.lanified.com/forums


There's plenty happening and boy are we excited to bring it all to you. If you know of any other people who would enjoy our events, don't hesitate to spread the word. It really helps us, and helps you have a great time too. To sign up or prepay for our LAN party head to the event details at: http://www.lanified.com/events/details/6

Tune in or join in!

 

[BloodyIron]

Good news everyone! Our coming event will be our best one yet!


Within the last day we broke our record for sign-ups! As of this writing we sit at 47 sign-ups, and people just keep on coming. If you want to secure your seat we advise you to do so promptly, as prepay will close this coming Friday at midnight. Prepaying also enables you to pledge to unlock the higher prize pot for the tournament(s) you want to enter! The event is less than three weeks away, we can barely contain ourselves.


As you may know we recently revised our Starcraft 2 tournament. As such we have made some revisions to our Team Fortress 2 tournament. First, we added the maps koth_badlands and koth_lakeside_final to the list of playable maps. Second, we adjusted the points for arena. To win a round you must now reach 5 points, up from 4. To win the whole match your team must earn 8 points, up from 5. So to clarify, if your team were to gain 5 points the first round your team would then swap sides and start the second round, and if your team were to then earn 3 more points your team would win with a total of 8 points. We also have revised the list of banned weapons, the full list is:

• Back Scratcher
• Battalions Backup
• Brass Beast
• Candy Cane
• Jag
• Mad Milk
• Natasha
• Sandman
• Vita-saw
• Warrior's Spirit
• Wrangler

Once again we will be broadcasting this week. This week's schedule will be the following.

Wednesday: 5pm - 9pm MST (GMT-7): Starcraft 2 King of the Hill

We are hosting our King of the Hill event again for Starcraft 2, open to anyone in North America! To participate join the in-game channel LANified! and make sure you are ready to enter in time for the broadcast. We will be using the same rules and map list as before.

Thursday: 5pm - 9pm MST (GMT-7): TF2 Pub Stomp

Come beat us up on our public server! We'll be playing on there making sure the kart doesn't move. To join simply connect to our public server at tf2b.lanified.com which is up all the time.

To watch any of these broadcasts head to http://www.lanified.com/networks


Just a few days ago S2 Games celebrated the 1 year anniversary of the release of Heroes of Newerth. As such they are letting anyone (yes even you) create accounts and play for free! This will be available until May 22nd at 12am EST. If you want to check out this quality game just head to https://www.heroesofnewerth.com/trial.php create an account and get cracking! There are also plenty of recent improvements including a guide system, which is really helpful for playing heroes you aren't familiar with. Oh, and did we mention it works in Windows, Mac OS AND Linux? What are you waiting for? IT'S FREE!


We would also like to remind those interested that we can be followed on facebook at http://facebook.lanified.com , which we post regular updates to our events. We also run a minecraft server at mine.lanified.com . And we are working our butts off to make this coming LAN party absolutely fabulous. So we hope to see you there!

 

[BloodyIron]

Good news everyone, we have some great things going on!

First, we will be broadcasting again this week, check it out

Wednesday: 5pm - 9pm MST (GMT-7): Starcraft 2 King of the Hill
We will be hosting our KotH event again, open to anyone in North America! To enter just join channel LANified! in-game and make sure you are ready to play. The map list will follow the ladder list but we will also take variant requests such as MLG/iCCup variants.

Thursday: 5pm - 9pm MST (GMT-7): Heroes of Newerth King of the Hill
We will be bringing a completely new program to you this week with a Heroes of Newerth King of the Hill event. Think you got an ace team? Make sure you're in channel LANified! in-game and we'll pit your team versus any challenging team available. This will be a 5v5 King of the Hill event on Forests of Caldavar and we will be using Banning Pick mode with Tournament Rules enabled. To keep things simple and organized, if you want to enter please declare your captain and we will coordinate with them for your matches. This will follow along the same idea of our Starcraft 2 KotH in that if you lose you are out. So assemble your team and make sure you show up!

To watch our broadcasts, head to http://www.lanified.com/networks


Second, we are making some adjustments for our coming event

We are adjusting the prizing for Team Fortress 2 and Starcraft 2. Team Fortress 2 will go from a $120 first place prize pool, to a $120 first place/$60 second place prize pool. Starcraft 2 will go from a $100 first place prize pool, to a $100 first place/$40 second place prize pool. If we get enough pledges from our prepaid attendees these will bump up even further.

We will be adjusting our seating to accommodate 40 people total. If you are planning to attend (and have not prepaid) we recommend you arrive as early as possible to ensure your seat.

We have updated the Team Fortress 2 server configurations for the tournament, including the recent adjustment to the arena points. But more importantly we have added support for the Replay feature for all the tournament servers. This way you can grab that sweet rampage you just did at the drop of a hat.

Unfortunately our regular concession staff will not be able to make this event, so we will be providing an alternative concession. We are not able to offer everything that was previously offered, but we are trying our hardest to offer a good alternative. Please don't kill us over this, we're sorry.

 

[BloodyIron]

Good news everyone!

Our event is THIS WEEKEND! Doors open at 10am Saturday and the first 5 people to attend get a free cpu magazine cloth mousepad! Before you come don't forget to review the list of what to bring, you can find a full list at the top of the event details ( http://www.lanified.com/events/details/6 ), but most importantly everyone must bring a legal ID and if you are under 18 a legal guardian must be present for check-in. We also recommend that before you come you try and clean up your system. We recommend you use Spybot Search & Destroy, Malwarebytes Anti Malware and Microsoft's Security Essentials (all free) to help clean up your system before you come. Virii and malware at LANs are no fun at all. This is also very important to do if you plan to fileshare during the event (don't let that gigabit networking go to waste!).

Also from now until noon Saturday we will be running another flash game challenge. The person with the highest score for the flash game Gimme Friction Baby ( http://www.lanified.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=27&t=109 ) will earn themselves a cloth Heroes of Newerth mousepad! To claim this mousepad you must be present at the event at noon. To report a score you must take a screenshot of your high score and post it as a reply to the thread in the forum. Please try to crop your picture to only show the game.

During the LAN we will be hosting a local only Minecraft build server. It will have a clean fresh new world for you to hack and slash at, and to build your monolithic figures on. Right now we are planning to have monsters on, pvp off, and we will be running it for the duration of the event. If you want to see any changes for this server please post on our forums ( http://www.lanified.com/forums/ ).


The tournament schedule for this event is as follows:

Starcraft 2: 1400hrs (2pm) Saturday
Team Fortress 2: 2100hrs (9pm) Saturday
Heroes of Newerth: 1200hrs (noon) Sunday


We will be broadcasting again this week, you might recognize our schedule:

Wednesday: 5pm - 9pm MST (GMT-7): Starcraft 2 King of the Hill
Last week we had some fantastic plays between entrants, this week should be a great opportunity for people to get some practice in before our event this weekend. To enter just join channel LANified! in-game and make sure you're ready when we call for our next contestant. The challenger chooses the map. The map list follows the ladder list but we allow competitive variants too.

Thursday: 5pm - 9pm MST (GMT-7): Heroes of Newerth King of the Hill
Once again we will be running a 5v5 King of the Hill event. We will be hosting the games on USE so if you ping well enough to USE servers we welcome you to assemble a team and enter. The easiest way to enter is to join channel LANified! in-game. It will be on Forests of Caldavar with Banning Pick and Tournament Rules enabled. Please try to organize your team in advance so that we can make this a smooth event. If you want you can use our mumble server for your team at voice.lanified.com (default port). If you need us to setup any channels for you, just let us know and we can get right on that.

To watch our broadcasts, as always, just head to http://www.lanified.com/networks , if you know anyone who would be interested in watching please feel free to pass the link around.


As a brief reminder, we still run several public servers which are open to anyone:
Mumble: voice.lanified.com
Team Fortress 2: tf2b.lanified.com (tf2a is in the works)
Minecraft: mine.lanified.com

If there's anything you want to see on these servers, just post on our forums and we'll see what we can do to help you.


Hope to see you this weekend!