Hi guys,

usual drill: after your LAN experience has ended, we'd appreciate it if you could take a little time to give us some feedback on the LAN. What you liked, what you didn't, what you'd suggest, and why.

Key topics are obviously the changes in how we do things, and the resultant price savings for you, but anything goes.

On behalf of the staff, thanks for turning up and making it a great LAN, and we hope to see you at the next one in July!* **

*(2nd - 4th)
** excepting any WeeLANs we manage to get organised.

Probably the best Gumpcom I've been to so far. The big games were amazing (still so fucking proud of my Pirate Wars shenanigans ) and the banter was brilliant (is this important? ). That's the only 2 reasons I go to Gumpcom, and they were both fucking amazing. 10/10.

I agree this was one of the best GumpCom LANs I have been to and I am well glad that I did go.

The format was great, I never took part in that many of the big games but had a fair few big games of Supreme Commander which was great.

DO NOT CHANGE A THING!!

I hope to see you all next time.

Ok my lan review

The Hall: Delivered as usual, plenty of space to move and sleep. Facilities were good too and it was nice and warm. Good shout moving the spare table to keep the console corner to itself. Lighting was ok too cuz usually i come away with a sore head but i seem to be ok this time

Atmosphere: Umm ye there wasn't one? For the majority of the lan i looked around and saw maybe about 1/3 of every1 there watching tv or movies. Just keeping themselves to themselves and tbh it's just not cool. There was no "get up and go", some folk seemed rather "dour".

Tourneys: Ok this was by FAR the biggest let down for me. Now before i go on my wee rant here (no small jokes allowed) i understand this was a "reboot" LAN and all that jazz. No matter what the objective of the lan is, you need to have some core games. Css/UT/CoD/L4D and some sort of strat games. Ok so we had warsaw, the light weight UT. Ye thats fun for a while and then it's just boring as hell. Why didn't we play UT? every1 has it and it's not as repetitive. Ye we had Cod! Oh no wait we had Cod where if u have a lvl 55 ur going to win insted of using a mod which would keep every1 at the same level and make the tourney far more enjoyable. This is why i didn't enter, what was the point? It wasn't about winning, it was just pointless. Armagetron? I'm sorry what? As a fucking tournament i mean c'mon seriously. But the pinnicle of shite tourneys was audiosurf. Oh god i almost lost the will to live.

The tourneys just failed, period.

Touney schedule: Ye this is a chill out lan so lets have fun and play some touneys BUT IF U AIN'T ON THE FUCKING SERVER IN 5 MINS WE WILL FIND U AND BREAK OFF BOTH UR LEGS! I'm sorry what? So i'm out getting some munch or in th middle of something i have to forfeit? Gid aine seriously.

Food: Excellent as usual. Loved the bacon rolls and a big thank you to Gumps dad for providing it. Big thumbs up there.

Admins: Well from what i saw of them ye were ok ye. Spoke to barrie for a bit, hadn't seen him in ages. Spoke to neo for a bit too, and then lucy and abraxus spoke to me at the end. Apart from that theere was no real interaction with admins, i didn;t even know who they fucking were! Just had to look at the admin row and guess "oh ye that boys sitting in an admins seat, so he has to be an admin?". Would help if u wore something saying admin or smth, not a big deal but ye it's helps.

Intranet: Perfect. It always is tho and you sort of expect it now i spose. But ye good work on that.

Random Games: I was actually about to say well done for the GunGame and Battlefield games, but then i realised that Phil was the one who set those up. I then also realised that these we the ONLY LAN games i played in all fucking weekend. This is because Phil and the other playime guys came round saying "this is what we're doing, it's gonna be fun so get on the server". That worked. Thank you to the other Playtime gaming folks for providing these.

Now on to my proper rant bitty. Ok for 70% of the lan there was fuck all happening. This sorta forced us to play wow and other online games to keep ourselves occupied. The ONLY way you were able to get us off wow was to turn off the wow ports. Now i'm sorry, if you have to go to those extremes to get us to do that then there is something SERIOUSLY wrong. I like wow but i don't wanna be playing it at lan unless there really is nothing else happening. I played wow lets say 90% of the lan, not thru choice but thru a lack of options. Again there just doesn't seem to be any enthusiasm, from other most LAN'ers or admins to get stuff going. There was massive enthusiasm for fucking RockBand tho, umm ok thats great for lan? -.-. The only people that were doing so that i saw were Phil and Walter (and no i'm not just saying that cuz they're my mates).

Sorry if this seems a bit harsh, and this isn't a dig at anyone inparticular. It's just disappointing that the biggest LAN in scotland, even on a chill out LAN, had nothing going on for the vast majority of the event. Getting some of the old games back like UT/CSS and perhaps CnC/DoW would really help. They can be both competitive and fun and the majority of people have them and can participate.

So thats my review, on the whole it really wasn't great but it was nice seeing old friends again. The glasgow banter was just awesome .

x

Thoroughly enjoyed myself. Had quite a few good laughs. Was interesting talking to and getting a beat down with our american visitor - DJ Astov. He actually saw our LAN as one of the biggest he has been to.

Catering provided by the Original Gump and Gumpess - excellent. The dinner beat the hamburgers and cheaseburgers by a mile and it was healthier. I had the hash, what did you have?

Ran my own servers of CSS Hide 'n' Seek, armagetron and a couple of others. I was unsure of doing it at first, but I'm glad I did and plan to do it again.

My only real criticisms of the LAN were

• a couple of Gumpcom game servers hadn't been configured and proven to work properly prior to the LAN
• tournament servers were not running when people were asked to get onto them
• there was a lack of patch cables at my desk (a few had brought consoles and had snaffled up mine already so I "borrowed" the cable of someone who hadn't turned up)

But once again, I'LL BE BACK.

Arrived at half 8, 9ish and missed the sign up for a fair few tournies. We only had 3 on a team for L4D which got deleted before it started because we only had 3, rather than just adding someone on. But to be fair, i'm actually not that fussed about this as I enjoyed just sitting relaxing after a shit week at work.

The problem with having such a busy tournament schedule isn't just that your leaving yourself little room from compromise and relying on folk being snappy onto the server, but the fact is you've schedule says 3-4 rounds of a tournament that 1. might not even need 3-4 rounds and 2. when people get kicked out the first few rounds... what are they to do then? They're being left to there own accord until "big games" come about which take about 40 minutes to start and last a grand total of 20 minutes. The longest lasting "big game" was gun game i think, and as much as I love css and gun game, there aren't many games that are as repetitive as it is. Also, there is zero point in runing tournaments that have 3/4 teams in them. They last 2 minutes and there isn't even enough time for people to enjoy them, so my advice is to stick to games that people actually have and may play (CoD4, CSS, UT/Quake/Warsaw, DoW?) and whatever GOOD free games you can get (pretty much just Trackmania and Warsaw tbh).

On the whole, a generous 7/10. Looking forward to what this wee lan has in store.

Grub was excellent, hall was great (nice and warm at night!). A few of the staff seemed to actually be doing something and a big thanks to Phil aswell for being on hand to keep alot of the servers going okay (and healing a million heroics).

Probably the best LAN I've been to yet. I enjoyed all the big games that I took part in and even when I was away from my comp it was nice talking to folk again. I felt more involved with things.

I really only took part in the Rock Band tournament. I thought the tournaments were a nice choice.

Overall a good LAN and I don't think much should be changed! I'd like to see the raffle back and possibly the involvement of the people who win tourneys. Like we used to, get the projector set up and announce the winners officially. You don't need a trophy just get them up on the stage, take some pics etc =]

Affro is right. I'll go slit my wrists now, bawwww.

Another great LAN so glad I managed to get the time off at the last minute.

Tournaments.
Bit of a let down as not enough people entered to buff up the teams, winning TF2 felt a bit shallow when there were only 3 teams entering. For me Left 4 Dead doesn't work as a tournament. Great LAN game but is not suited to competitive play. Warsow was a bit iffy, I realise that the older version is used due to it's unique capture the flag but when everyone had upgraded the night before is it really sensible to keep using the old version? I agree with Scougle though, If there's going to be death match style gaming might as well do it properly and use UT3, 2K4 or even Quake 3 Arena. King of the Consoles was absolutely spot on though was exactly how it should be.

Food.
Was the best food LAN has ever had, major compliments to Chef Original Gump. Was the first LAN I didn't go out for takeaway.

Sleeping Areas could have been planned better on the Fri/Sat only option was 2/3rds of the balcony due to the scaffolding and the room above the kitchen locked. Though this was sorted for Sat/Sun.

Big Games.
Were good but just lacked the enthusiasm of previous LANs many will remember the crazy games of CSS dodgeball while shouting across the hall. Was really looking forward to BF2 only to find that I couldn't play due to being unable to access my account, not sure if that was my PC/game or if it was the network.

I'm not going to post up a review but for the love of god, can punters stop trying to answer valid points that people have taken the time to type up and express, it just looks like a team of punters jumping in as soon as the slightest negative thing is raised, remember, your not staff, no one is asking you to answer or respond to anything on their behalf, Haioko's last post would be an example of this.

*also - Haioko, google Prerogative, it totally doesn't fit in that sentence.

I really enjoyed myself. I've said before I only go to GumpCom for the banter which was absolutly amazing this weekend.

Im glad that you managed to keep to the schedule and everything was run when it should have been, give or take 5 minutes. The disqualification of teams who arent there when they should be may seem harsh, but it keeps everything run smoothly.

The big games where a blast. Gutted not that many people where player TF2 but the big CSS games where top notch.

So, all in all, no complaints from me at all really.

Well as this was my 3rd LAN, and the last two were chillLans (one not by choice), I rather enjoyed the more semi tournament atmosphere , although there was a bit of this at the last ChillLAN anyway.

The schedule and layout was nice, along with announcements beforehand. There was an instance however where one team was disqualified because they didnt have enough members. I think this is a bit harsh, as there were only 4 teams (Left4dead) and with abit of leeway this couldve have been more. I know we need to keep the schedule moving, but not at the expense of people not being able to play.

The free games for fun in background was a great idea, as I ended up trying a few new ones, Pirates, Vikings & Knights for example and was good laugh

I still think a little more can be done from an admin point of view. Ive been to 3 LANs now and not once has there been a kind of intro "this is who we are and what we do kinda thing". I dont even know half of your names, and so most of the time I dont want to disturb you.

I am a big RTS fan, and I noticed a last LAn some guys were playing SupCom, so I tried installing and learning it. I know someone saw me playing it and said i should join in the LAN skirmish. This I didnt really know about. I think an admin or two were playing this as well, wouldve been nice if a weee shoutout couldve been done to let people know.

The shoutbox on the LAN is ok, but not heavily used. I would've liked if the admins can make themselves more available totry get people LANNING together. Most of the non tournament LAN games have to be organised by ourselves. Likes of AVP, or SupCom, or C&C. I dont know everyone at the LAN, i dont know who has what game, and I dont have access to the PA or dedicated servers, so I feel this is more an admin task.

I know this is cheesy, but maybe if you like assign an admin to a pod or something, and just have them occasionally drop by and ask each person, are you happy / gettin on ok, need help getting a LAN game setup? I would feel a little more comfortable with that, rather than walking up to them, wondering what their name is, and saying, hi, would you mind stopping your game right now to come help me randomly try get a LAN game of blah blah blah.


Other than that, all goood WIll be at next one no doubt.

Great idea!

Decent LAN. I arrived late on Friday and it seemed like I'd already missed my opportunity to sign up for any of the tournaments, though it was mostly laziness on my part. Since I wasn't involved in any of the tournaments, I didn't have a lot to do other than the occasional game of SupCom (those were awesome, btw) and a few random games. The "alternative" games that run alongside the tournaments, while an excellent idea, are still a bit haphazard and disorganised meaning that very few people play them. I'm not sure how this could be fixed; perhaps choose games which scale well from 4 players to 32 (some classic deathmatch or TDM games like UT2K4 might fit the bill).

ProPunch was good as always, though there wasn't as much of an atmosphere as there normally was - probably the larger hall to blame, as it was a blast at the weeLAN. Upshot of running the server for this was that I finally cracked open the Source SDK and I've started work on a proper mod for ProPunch. Spent most of saturday learning about the SDK and modding for the source engine, so yeah I contributed to that 1/3 to 1/2 of the room that weren't gaming. That's how I roll, I'm afraid.

Sunday was the best day for me, as most of the tournaments and shit were out the way and people were more open to playing random games. Got a few good games of SupCom going, and also an excellent game of MW2. The gungame server Phil ran was fucking brilliant, though I would have benefited from downloading the map pack before hand I think

Overall score: 6/10. I love the idea of admins assigned to groups of folk, and would go so far as to say that a cluster like that becomes a team for some of the less serious games. Get people talking to new people, because I know that personally, depending on what mood I'm in, I won't talk to new people without some kind of ice breaker. A game of something where those teams can play together, like BF2, might be just the trick.

I take partial responsibility for that as many of the SupCom games were done with me instigating or trying to round up members for them and for this I apologise.

The idea of an admin "patroling" a block of tables is a good one and I think would work pretty good until they get hooked on shit like DJ Hero etc on the consoles (which is really annoying btw).

Hooked? I like the game... I'm not the only admin that wanders around btw and its amazing so shut your face!

Some feedback from the weekend - I'm busy so will keep it brief.

How about getting the admins out of the safety and isolation of the "admin row" and running them down the edges of the table clusters on the ends near the middle of the room (A8/9 ,B8/9, C8/9 etc). I only saw maybe 4 of the admins out from behind thier own monitors at the admin row for longer than the time taken to wander down for a piss across the entire duration of the weekend (Abrax, Neo, Lithgow, Chris).

There is nothing to prevent any kit you dont want passers by messing with being located further back on the stage, allowing you to do away with the admin row entirely, and opening up the ends of the rows to allow for human circulation up that end of the hall. At present it is very "us and them" in terms of seating. Having a "top table" is like being at a fucking wedding.

Less but better tournaments. Warsow + LFD2 + TF2 + CoD4? While for the most part they all "happened", 3 teams does not a knockout tournament maketh. Drop it to 1 knockout tournament, played over 4-5 hours on the saturday afternoon, start to finish. Where a waste of everyones time.

Drumming@ LAN - is a fucking scourge. People need to realise that turning down the TV your playing on does not also suppress the constant tapping - and those mesh top drums make no fucking difference.

Big Games - progress vs previous events but better shedule planning and prep needed - Just because you've managed to fit a load of shite somewhere into a linear timeline doesnt mean you have a a sensible time plan as the really "good" stuff gets lost in the mess. Less is more, between all the scheduled tournaments and the big games, I could pick out maybe 3 that saw more than a dozen simultaneous players at any time - that should tell you something.

On the game server front, I ended up hosting BF2, Gungame "big game" servers along with a load of 24/7 pub's on my box (The boyscout in may once again showing that it pays to come prepared). It might be a plan to discuss exactly what "big games" will consist of in advance, in order for folk to be prepped better (e.g. folk not being able to log into thier BF2 online accounts via the internet connection, many didnt realsie you can play on lan using a "single player" offline account)?, and to allow for perfect server configs to be ready and waiting (and save me hacking the fuck out of one of my CSS configs to get gungame deathmatch turbo working due to the version on the main Gumpcom server not allowing respawning - I counted 44 folk simultaneously logged onto it at one stage, making it the winning big social game of the event!).

Toilet management was better this time, though bog roll did run low on the sunday.

Food was solid, well done Gumps Dad. Bigger Chilli Pot required next time methinks.

I've spoken to Chris already about some pointers for network setup that became somewhat apparent when things where under real "LAN" load (read: 44 folk on a 100 tick gungame server) - but I'm sure thats something he will play about with and tweak - 98% of folk didnt/couldnt notice anyway.

Was very positive to see so many bodies still actively gaming at 5pm+ on Sunday.

Internet connection was generally okay for light usage, but was (as usual) getting pretty badly humped by selfish downloaders all weekend. Sort out some traffic shaping on torrents at the gateway.

Wowfapple feedback:-
Thanks to Greeno for slipping my scrub druid healer into his VoA 25 guild run. That Toravon 25 Achievement means I'll be able to lie my way into any pub I choose in future. Winner. Also thanks to Tyko for showing me the glory that is Grid + Clique, how any druid healer can function in a raid without them is a mystery to me.

I'd love to be more organised and detailed in my feedback, but I'm busy, so it'll have to wait.

Overall - 6/10 - which is actual terms is a massive improvement over the previous gumpcom I attended, which was utter shite in comparison, so don't be disheartened. Take some more advice regarding how to build a schedule and motivate players for big games and that will rise further.

#Wonderdog

I enjoyed myself at the weekend. wasnt the best GL ive been at but certainly wasnt the worst one either.

Tournaments - Although the tournament schedule was a hell of a lot better it still could do with a few more changes. i found when i was getting ready to play a 'big game' of something another round of a tounrament game was about to start. (although we had an epic game of Warsow in round 2!!) personally i think the schedule (not just for tournaments) is still a bit too full....
Oh and The night before the Warsow tournament there was a big game of it so alot of people downloaded the 0.5 version. But the tournament was using 0.3 and no one was told this until we tried to join the server. A heads up would have been nice.

The games where a good choice but not enough teams where in them to make it worth winning or even entering. Either change to games which are more popular at LANs or change the number of people in each team. I remember there used to be a 2v2 CSS tournament which was really fun to play in.

Servers - This was the bigest downfall for me at the weekend. The servers could have been better to say the least, alot of them where not set up properly and not ran by the admin team but i think most people know this already.

Food - totally awesome. The mac n cheese was superb. No complaints there.

Hall - was good as usual but the scafolding stole my sleeping place but as i understand it you didnt know it was gonna be there either so meh
On the sunday morning/afternoon People (you know who you are! ) where playing music quite loud on there speakers which i found quite annoing. I mean c'mon.....barbie girl, WTF?!?!?!!?

From saturday about 1pm till about 8pm the internet should not be used or internet gaming. even just turn it off, this will force people to play more LAN games and it worked for Gungame on Saturday night.
Gungame was fun but the maps where way too small for the amout of people that where playing. I got frustrated because i kept getting spawn raped and ended up leaving not that long in.

Over all i enjoyed myself, i found myself busy most of the time and had a few laughs aswell. Theres still a few more things to do before its back where it used to be but its a step in the right direction at least.

6/10

that is becoming harder and harder with many games like MW2 throwing a hissy fit if net connection aint available (I ran a private match server for this for a few hours on sunday).

I seen ALOT more wow players this lan than others I have attended which kinda defeats the purpose of a LAN as previously mentioned.

From what Chris has told me everyone was capped until saturday night to something like 75kb/s on the net connection so it really shouldn't have slowed us down that much as most of the games just need it for authentication (steam is a cunt for that).

I don't have any issues with this LAN to be honest.
There was a lot of WoW players (including myself) and I think we nearly died when the ports were turned off for a bare minute!
But in all fairness, it was a good idea, if only there were more games to play as a WHOLE rather than some people playing this and some playing that.
From what I have been hearing from Stank and Explicit, CSS was what drew the people in to the LAN (some folk were coming up from England just to play it). If it was brought back, then you would probably be able to get a 100 people LAN and keep prices down. Everyone has CSS i'm guessing.
This is my second LAN so I don't really know what it used to be like when CSS was there so if anybody wants to comment then please go for it
Now I don't have Left 4 Dead 2 or any CoD (for computer anyway) so I couldn't really participate in those tourneys. Believe me, if I had them, I would have been the first to sign up

On a more positive note, the food was awesome! Compliments to Chef Original Gump there from the majority i presume!

This is only my opinion and I know some of you will oppose to some of points but at least the admins are hearing what we have to say so they can sum it all up and act on it.

Cheers guys for an awesome LAN

Oh, aye, and Original Gump's cooking was the baws. That chilli was fucking amazing.