Organizing LAN parties

[Akkernight]

My college class is trying to get some money in to use for a trip to Greece next year and i'm one of the guys set in charge of a LAN party idea... So I wanted to ask if anyone here has tried this before or something like it, and has any tips?

It would also be cool if someone had any hints on how to charm sponsors to support such things? :P

-Akker

[brewbuck]

Booze and women always worked for me in the 90's...

[Akkernight]

well, women are hard to find at a LAN party unless you pay them :P

[Neo1]

How many people are you planning on inviting?

Oh, and i have had bad experiences with excessive amount of booze and other people's hardware :P Not recomendable!

[Akkernight]

there are about 49 000 people on these islands, and we are inviting all gamers, so about 100 to 500? :P

And yeah drinking should... Be done outside if you feel like drinking

[abachler]

Lots of tables and chairs if you expect 100-500. Extra patch cables, and some LAN cards for sale, someones card will always crap out, I'd recommend 6-12. Also have spares for all your equipment too, and don't expect to run a 500 people LAN party on one linksys router. Give people a couple weeks notice and have a refreshment stand available.

[zacs7]

Try and stop file sharing. All the LANs I've been to, the EA reps get quite upset when people are sharing and playing the latest EA games.

It also makes it hard for them to join the official server (if you run one).

Speaking of which, I would think about running a few dedicated servers for the popular games (Say Battlefield) etc. With 500 people you'll want a gigabit backbone too.

[Akkernight]

ok, I'll try to collect data from the currently biggest LAN party on these islands, see how many were for it

EDIT: ok, the LAN party that was in 2007 had 150 people...

[brewbuck]

Oh, and i have had bad experiences with excessive amount of booze and other people's hardware :P Not recomendable!

One of our first parties was back when CD burners still cost $1,000 or more. We had several of them at the party. Drinking was involved. Somebody left the CD tray extended from one of the burners, and some poor drunk managed to bump into it and snap it off.

It was briefly considered whether to beat him up (by "him" I mean the guy who bumped into the drive as well as the moron who left the tray extended), but in the end we decided to try to fix it. We found a CD-ROM (not burner) drive sitting around from the same manufacturer. We took apart the casings of both drives. It was really only a plastic gear and small metal pin that were bent out of shape. We replaced the components with the same components from the CD-ROM drive. Worked like a charm.

(We were all completely drunk while doing it)