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Quake First Person Shooters (Games)

Million Man LAN 167

Posted by michael from the half-a-league-onward dept.
stovey-san writes: "LanWar(EAST: Louisville,KY) and LANtrocity(WEST: L.A., CA) are teaming up to form one of the largest lanparties ever, MillionManLan. Check it out, both sides are to have up to 2,500 participants with linked networks for the ultimate fragfest for a total of 5,000 gamers! Lanwar 12 is starting tomorrow (Sat-Sun) with a sold out 562 gamers, so expectations are high! MML takes off on May 25 for SIX straight days!"
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Million Man LAN More

Million Man LAN

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  • And only here.... (Score:1, Flamebait)

    by Afreet1 ( 224290 )
    And only here will we announce.....A new GAME!!! Super Mario Brothers 3!!!!!

    (From "The Wizard")
    • I don't think many are getting the reference. Means they are either too young or too old. That was a pretty lame movie, though at the time I thought that red-headed girl was pretty hot.

      California! California!
  • I get to start a lan party club at school.
    I told the principal me and some friends want to play CounterStrike against each other, and if we could use the schools network. I told him we have our own computers, etc, etc.
    He said we could use school computers (some are 700mhz Athlons, so they would run it fine),
    and it gets counted as a Club, so I can actually put on my Resume or whatever that I'm the founder of my Schools Lan Party Club.

    • Re:On a side note... (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I told the principal me and some friends want to play CounterStrike against each other, and if we could use the schools network.

      When you put this on your r&#233sum&#233, be sure to have an adult proofread it for you.

      m-kay?

    • Re:On a side note... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Krimsen ( 26685 ) on Friday January 18, 2002 @11:07PM (#2866248)
      Make sure they understand what CounterStrike is. If they think it is like SuperMario Brothers and they catch you guys playing it, they might consider you guys to be "at risk" for Columbine-type behavior. I'm not trying to be funny, so make sure your school administration understands what kinds of games you guys are going to play.
  • I sure wish I could make it down to LA that weekend, but unfortunately I will be in Cancun for the whole of May :)

    Oh well, I just hope that the West shows the East who's the baddest. Too bad I won't be there to help my team frag them.
  • Are lans suddenly "exciting" now ?

    I find them extremely tedious, and full of 12 year old CS cheaters^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hplayers

    (fp)
    • > I find them extremely tedious, and full of 12 year old CS cheaters^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hplayers

      Are you kidding?! This is the *dream* of CS players everywhere. If someone seems to be cheating, you can locate him, yank him away from his computer, and SEE if he has any cheat programs loaded up.

      And if he does... oh the screams. The wonderful, musical screams of cheaters in agony! Screaming, sobbing, crying out for their mothers! But will their mothers come? NO! Only wave after wave of HORRIBLE, SEARING PAIN!!! I can almost hear them now...

      Why no, I don't think I play too much Couterstrike.
    • 1. with so many people, i really dont think it will be fun. lanparties are supposed to be between friends and stuff. i doubt it that there will be any of the usual fun a lanparty has !

      2. procurve ? WTF ? are they mad ? damn, they should have chosen Cisco equipment :P
  • And it's usually a good one. Pity I can't make it to LA for some live LANtastic fragging.

  • Will this be a good place to pick up hot chicks?? (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Will this be a good place to pick up hot chicks??
  • ..they'll beat the numbers at the 1995 Million Man March [yaledailynews.com] in no time flat.
  • With the number of gamers out there, ranging from casual to hardcore, why not take this concept one step further? Create the Internet3, a network optimized for gaming.

    Of course, you'd have to come up with a cool name for it, otherwise it'll never happen. I suggest "ph4tn3t" ;)
    • It's been done. See Barrysworld [barrysworld.com] or Jolt [jolt.co.uk] or Splatterworld [splatterworld.de] or Boomtown [boomtown.net], Danish telecom [www.tdc.dk]'s gaming net.

      All of these are ISPs, but specifically geared toward gaming -- that is, low ping, ample game servers, admins available to kick cheaters, etc. Most of them have a presence on QuakeNet [quakenet.org], for those IRC-inclined.

      Someday the States will have a gaming ISP as well.

  • Great fbi opportunity (Score:4, Insightful)

    by perdida ( 251676 ) <.moc.oohay. .ta. .tcejorptaerhteht.> on Friday January 18, 2002 @10:58PM (#2866217) Homepage Journal
    this LAN party will be a great opportunity for FBI entrapment stings on warez distributors, hax0rs, movie pirates, and, of course, terrorists.

  • *SIX DAYS?!* (Score:4, Offtopic)

    by mewsenews ( 251487 ) on Friday January 18, 2002 @11:02PM (#2866226) Homepage
    Hmm, let's see:
    • bad take-out food
    • no showers
    • sleeping on the floor
    • best company the guy on the machine next to you
    • staring blankly at a screen for more time than could EVER be considered healthy


    I propose they should rename these things from "LAN parties" to "Sysadmin Boot Camp".
    • And not the boots you *wear*, the boots you expertly apply to you malfunctioning boxen.
      • No take-out is bad take-out.
      • We'll shower with compressed air cans.
      • Sleep? Even god waited till the 7th day to rest!
      • We always spend this much time in front of our computer screen. It's just now we don't have to do it at home/work.
  • The only problem with a 6-day LAN party, aside from the fact that you'll need to carry in a fridge to feed yourself, is the fact that undoubtedly many of the people there will be your stereotypical computer nerd. And will not shower. For 6 days. I think that's as good a reason as any to avoid a LAN party that big.

    Gawyn
  • Sure, lots and lots of people to play, but I honestly don't see how this would be any more fun than going to a LAN for one specific game and having much fewer people. That way competition will be good, tips will be shared, and it is a more personal experience. If I wanted to join this many people I'd just fire up my game server browser and pick one of the thousands of Half-Life games going and play there.

    ..or any other online game for that matter.
  • Hmm... Nice pings for you AND all your teammates, that's worth it in and of itself. [millionmanlan.com] Play any games you bring [millionmanlan.com], although the big tourneys only feature 3 games, decided by vote.

    (Flamebait, but try to take it in the spirit intended, please:)
    Why did it have to be millionMANlan, instead of millionPERSONLAN?
    • Man rhymes with LAN.

      The only thing person rhymes with is... the first have or mercenary, and "The Million Person Mercen" just sounds like a name for a large orgy. I guess...
    • "Our stats show us that the pings on the main floor average between 30-90 pings."

      Ummmm I can ping servers on the west coast from Atlanta and get less than a 90ms ping. Everyone having the same ping wouldn't be all that fun anyway; I like fragging the 400ms laggers. :)
    • "Why did it have to be millionMANlan, instead of millionPERSONLAN?"

      Because english, unless used very specifically, is a genderless language. The word man has been (and if me and my english teachers have their way, will conitnue to be) used as a generic non-gender term for ages. It falls into the same category as he and his.

      If I'm trying to put down women, you'll know when I am. But I don't, I won't, and I'm not.

      It's right there, at dictionary.com [dictionary.com]. A "whopping" 33% of the definitions specify gender. The rest (10 of 15) clearly do not.

      I guess I've never been one to use fashionable language. Thank God, since if I went round saying some of the stuff (especially fake computer references) on TV I'd probably want to lock myself up! 8-D
  • Well, I got to wonder as to the headaches of making sure the network stay stable.

    And also an appropriate level map for a death match of 5,000. Maybe something like downtown LA or Area 51.

    ;-)

  • Why do they bother? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by 3Suns ( 250606 )
    Why do they even bother calling it a "Million Man Lan" if they are only going to accept 5,000?
    Seems to me they're undercutting themselves.
    • You know how the monetary unit reduces in value over time? While the inverse happens with the human unit. They just happened to plan it at just the right moment to make 1 million old people = 5,000 modern people! Pretty slick, eh?

  • FYI (Score:3, Informative)

    by zaphod.nu ( 100500 ) <peter@NoSPAm.zaphod.nu> on Friday January 18, 2002 @11:09PM (#2866261) Homepage
    Parties with over 5000 people (and that's 5000 in ONE place, no cheating like this) have been around for quiet a while in scandinavia.

    Dreamhack [dreamhack.org] and The Gathering (couldn't find a URL) comes to mind.

    We're bigger than you! :)
  • So, how to 5 thousand participants make this a million man lan party? I believe that they are 995,000 people short.

    Kent
  • They've already reserved space in the University of Loiusville gym for sleeping bags, after a 5 day frag-match I can't imagine the smell of a couple hundred gamers :) On the bright there's a case artist, and while you're having your case customed, get your sore frag muscles (arms?) rubbed by the professional masseur...

    ok so i'm going despite the fear of smelly retribution, 5 days of fraggin!
  • We can have a lot of use for all these 200-man people (1e6/5000=200) attending that party, like sending 200 letters to congressmen, or posting 200 troll messages on /. Oh, wait, nevermind.
  • I'm just as big a dork as i know, but i can guarantee you if i was going to LA for 6 days, i'd probably see the LAN-party all of about 3-4 hours max...the rest of the time i'd be partying balls all over LA. :)

    but thats just me

  • I was at DesertLAN in the beginning of Dec in Phoenix, AZ. It was the funnest ever. There was a CS Tournament, open gaming, and super monkey ball on a giant projection screen. I dunno how many people there are, but I know if work will allow me... I'll be at MML!
  • Man, them's gonna be some crusty gamers by Day Six. I think they should do a live webcast of the whole thing. Just imagine the thrill of watching gamers play against 5,000 other gamers. If they'd ever get RealAroma [realaroma.com] into production, it would even smell like you were there. Haw hawww hawwwwwww... *thud*
  • the MillionManLan when only 5000 are competing?

    That's 995,000 off!
  • Burden's prediction: East: 479,000 frags vs West: 312,000 frags.

    Kilgore's prediction: East: 548,000 frags vs West: 612,000 frags

    Is it just me, or do those figures seem a little low... let's see...5 000 players, at 1 frag per hour each over 6 days is about 720 000 frags...and i certainly hope they can get more than 1 frag per hour...if each got 5 frags per hour, that's 3.6 million frags... Sweet Merciful Crap!

    And don't tell me that they won't be going the whole time, because they will...

  • They could break some record and make it the biggest ever coax ring network ever to almost work...

    :-)

  • Is there any composite list of computer events throughtout the world?

    In a couple weeks i'm going to visit Boston for a few days, in June i'll be driving through the west of the U.S.A. and in the fall i'll be travelling throughout latin america. It would be nice to have a composite list of events and happenings of interest to computer geeks, including things like Defcon, Dreamhack, Burning Man, MacWorld Expo, YAPC etc. etc.

  • Lots of people! Playing computer games! On a LAN!

    Who friggen cares? Just get a cable modem and play on the internet, it's the exact same experience, except you don't have to be in a room with 2000 people who haven't showered in a week.

    I can see the point of getting together with a few of your friends and all playing Counterstrike (or whatever), but gatherings this large are pointless. You're paying >$50 to haul your computer over to some warehouse so you can play on some monster LAN that's as anonymous as the net. That strikes me as a dumb waste of money.

  • mmmmm beer (Score:2, Funny)

    by jezerbel ( 256675 )
    Delivery boy: "I've got a truck with pizzas here and loads of beer and red bull"
    Organisers: "Alright - who ordered pizza and beer?"

    I would so love to see all 5000 hands suddenly go up...
  • The Gathering, http://www.gathering.org, 5000 people, 5 days starting on Easter every year. Got showers and food of course. They would be larger but they can't find any place big enough to hold more and, last I heard from one of my friend's on the team, turned away ~5000 people last year.

  • You can get small single board Pentiums with the memory, networking, video and sound hardware all built in. There are many models of these. Some are designed for embedded use, others as industrial computers, and yet others for other purposes. Some can fit in the palm of your hand, and others are a little bigger.

    The really cool thing begins by buying a whole mess of these. Even different kinds. Modify a large tower case to contain them, and hack a high end KVM switch into the case, so that a single monitor, keyboard and mouse would be used. In other words, the thing would look like a factory made computer. Little does anybody know, there are, say, 40 computers inside.

    Some of these computers would have hard drives, and would contain all the data used by all the others.

    One of the computers would have two network interfaces, and would serve as a firewall and NAT "box" for the rest of the box, making it possible to hook up to an external network.

    One of the computers would be an X server. Its job would be to display the software running on all the other computers.

    All the others would boot various operating systems. You could run all the BSDs, several Linux distros, maybe one with your own Linux From Scratch setup, perhaps one of them would even run OS/2. Several might run VMWare or another virtualization system, so they could run more operating systems while other jobs are going on in the background. You would essentially end up with a "computer" that is actually a whole bunch of computers, running many operating systems and tons of software packages simultaneously.

    NOW HERE'S THE COOL PART!

    You take that to your next LAN party! Show everyone how you're running all kinds of applications in 20 different operating systems all at the same time, and the system stays very responsive!

    Oh well.

    • Actually, just a quick follow-up to my earlier post...

      For the longest time, I thought it would be cool to build a "render-farm" about the size of a refrigerator. I'd build this huge box about 6 feet cube. On two opposite sides, I'd put large double doors (with locking capability) to access the hardware inside.

      Inside this large box, I'd put 4 racks, one in front of each door, so that you'd only have to open one door to access one rack.

      I'd build 6 boxes for each rack, each containing, I estimate, 10 small single-board computers, each with individual power supplies and large hard drives. This would make 60 computers per rack, for a total of 240 computers inside the 6 foot cube. Actually, it wouldn't exactly be like that, because I'd get a few rackmount SGIs and put them in there as well.

      The entire cube would be temperature insulated and cooled by two separate techniques simultaneously. First, it would contain an elaborate liquid cooling system. Antifreeze would be cooled down to very cold temperatures and run through a series of pipes through the cube. Each rack would receive 6 pipes, one for each box on the rack. Each box would have a pipe running through it, going in between all the blades of a heat sink on each CPU, as well as any component of the power supply that I feel needs super cooling. There would be no fans on the power supplies, so they wouldn't take up so much room. After travelling through one box, the antifreeze would make another pass through the main cooler before continuing on to another box on the same rack, and then on the next rack, etc.

      The "main cooler" would actually be a series of radiators sitting inside a small freezer, with a large fan blowing the freezing air through them, by the way.

      In addition to the liquid cooling system, there would be an air conditioner large enough for a good sized room installed on top of the cube, inside a cool looking enclosure. All extra space beside and behind the racks would be for air conditioning ducts. Cold air would blow on all the electronic components, keeping them nice and cool. Like I said before, the entire 6 foot cube would be temperature insulated. The doors would seal the unit shut when closed, for the most part. This would keep most of the dust outside, and allow the air conditioning to remain a "closed" system.

      In the same room as this monstrocity, I'd build a large table in the shape of a U, or more like an O, but with an opening, so that a person (me) can sit inside the center. There would be 3 or 4 (or maybe 5) sets of monitors, keyboard and mouse on this desk. These would be dedicated X Window Systems, booting over NFS from one of the computers inside the cube.

      Now here's what I'd do with this mess. I'd be able to run stable and current versions of all the BSDs, quite a few Linux distros, one or two or about 10 built-from-scratch distros of the above, several OS/2 installations, just for fun, and a bunch of computers running various virtualization software, such as VMWare or Bochs (or whatever they renamed their project to)... the SGI boxes would obviously run IRIX. Collectively, this big "computer" would allow a whole mess of software to run. Some of the computers would be dedicated to compiling kernels and programs. Others would run databases, where I'd store just about everything I could dream of. Collectively, the entire system would act as a huge data storage unit, making just about everything accessible to just about all the computers through NFS, SMB, FTP, or whatever protocols I decide to use. All of this would be accessible from the dedicated X boxes on the circular desk.

      Once I have built one of these, I'll improve on the design and build more, until my entire house will be full of computers from floor to ceiling, leaving barely enough room to crawl around in access passages, and these computers would do just about every kind of processing there is... I might even have a network of 25 computers acting just as an elaborate firewall! Of course, before I can even start this project, I have to win the next huge lottery jackpot.

      Oh well... Nobody said you can't dream about crap like this. :-)

  • "Most number of male virgins gathered in one place."

    Wear your nicest anime shirt incase the Guiness people are on hand for a photo.

  • Lets See... (Score:4, Funny)

    by long_john_stewart_mi ( 549153 ) on Saturday January 19, 2002 @12:14AM (#2866465)
    I helped organize a LAN for 40 people and even that was hard - I can only imagine how difficult organizing a tournament with 5000 potential entrants would be. Also, what about the smell!? At our two-day LAN party, 5 people stank noticeably by the end of it, one really bad. Some quick math:
    5000 * (5/40) = 625 stinky people

    5000 * (1/40) = 125 really stinky people
    Well, that settles it... I'm not going. =)
  • ...one of the largest lanparties ever, MillionManLan . Check it out, both sides are to have up to 2,500 participants with linked networks for the ultimate fragfest for a total of 5,000 gamers...

    There's going to be 995,000 men there who are not gamers, eh?
  • I've been to about 4 or 5 of the Lanwar's in Louisville (Probably around 200 people when I started, up to the 540 one I'm going to tomorrow)... they're a lot more fun than playing online because there's so much more interaction, it's not just some 12-year-old with some stupid handle typing "CHEATER!" at you over and over... the staff is great and all the attendees are nice and friendly. I've never really noticed anyone having serious B.O., especially since everyone is constantly told to bring deoderant in the forums :)
  • A 5000 player LAN party is not that much considering that we in Denmark, (a country with 5,5 million citizens) for the past 10 years have held "The Party" with more that 3500 Guests. Take a look at the stats [theparty.dk]
  • To build a 6day Million Man Lan!

    What do bionic packets sound like?

    Dunnnnnnnananananananananana

    Brwwwwwwwwweeeeeeeeeeeeeee

    I wonder if we will ever get to that bionics stuff into people... :)
  • If there are going to be around 5000 people on the same LAN(even if they are switched), the lag would be horrible. You have to consider the protocols being used. To check for a local server on the LAN, a user needs to broadcast at layer 3 on the OSI model and get around the switches. That means that every time someone looks for the local server, they are going to be broadcasting to 4,999 other people. Do the math. Also, if they have an Internet connection they are going to be creating even more layer 3 traffic that will get broadcasted out all of the ports on the switches. You also have to realize that most people who don't much about networking are not going to disable other protocols that will be running(NEBIOS,IPX, ETC. This is even worse than the traffic from TCP/IP. Ethernet standards suggest about 500 users tops in the same broadcast domain. The only way this could work is if you were to use routers and different networks. This would then negate the LAN party and make it a WAN party. Just a thought.
  • all the porn you could get off open SMB shares?!?!?

    pow(//winluser/C$/porn,n)

  • Question for the fire marshall (Score:3, Funny)

    by MulluskO ( 305219 ) on Saturday January 19, 2002 @01:28AM (#2866826) Journal
    I don't know what your preferences are, but when we LAN party, we do it in the dark, as much dark as we can accomplish, save the glow of fifteen monitors.

    But with so many people, will it be legal or safe to darken the room?

    Alternatively, is it really safe to have 2500 grumpy sleepless nerds in one place?
  • Lanwar 12 is starting tomorrow (Sat-Sun)

    and you're telling me now?:)

    by the way, does anyone knows any online (European) Lanparty agenda?
  • Can you imagine a beowulf cluster of these?
  • (which doesn't matter to me, my nose doesn't work, ha!), this sounds like a neat thing. A few years ago (okay, better part of a decade ago), I was involved with the Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts' first Expo. (predecessor to the Atlanta Linux Showcase) We got a room down at Georgia Tech, and it was really much like a LAN party before LAN parties were common-- folks brought their own machines in and ran the demos that way, showing to the public what Linux could do, what hardware it could run on, and all sorts of cool stuff.

    Now, we had a few dozen machines there, and the infrastructure was non-trivial. Finding a place to host it was tough to begin with, and then, half-way through, I found myself throwing an extension cord over a balcony because we'd blown one of the breakers downstairs. How do you power 5,000 gamers and their Uber-Gamer rigs with the overclocked Athlons and the neon lights under the hood?

    We could get away with just a few cheap 10 megabit hubs, but gamers? 5,000 gamers? You're going to need more than just standard 100 megabit switches; you're really looking at Cisco Catalyst class hardware. The infrastructure to this thing, set up for only six days, must be mind-boggling. And you know how it always goes, you show up to a LAN party and there's always one guy who can't seem to get his machine on the network... Now there's a thousand of him... How do you schedule games? There's 5,000 people here, you're not gonna want to frag the same ones for six days straight...

    And after you've looked at all that, how you do it all at a price that'll still attract 5000 gamers, that's the impressive part...

    -JDF
  • I just had my own LAN party yesterday with 5 other people coming over for a day of gaming fun. We had a great time but I'm wondering if anyone has any tips or tricks relating to LAN parties?

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