Experience
In the articles to come there will be contributions from the guys in the trenches. The email we received asked about what Stompfest uses at its events. I asked the guys at Stompfest as well as many other organizers and their staff to share their experiences, good and bad, to help anyone who is or has contemplated hosting their own LAN party.
There are a few great gaming communities across North America. In each of these locations there are a lot of LAN parties. There are one or two 400-500+ sized parties. In addition there are a ton of 50-100+ LANs and many even smaller. Some people get the notion that you can just promote like crazy that you can land 250 people at your first event. There is a technical term for that kind of reasoning... Hogwash!
It takes time and effort to get a room filled like this.
The fact is that in those locations the smaller parties fuel the larger ones. Each has something different to offer. Without the small ones the bigger ones wouldn't exist. I have heard it said more than once, "If we host a 250 person LAN, we already have 50 here and we can get 50 people from party 'X', 100 from 'Y', and 75 from 'Z'." What they fail to understand is that 15 of the people that go to 'X' also attend 'Y' and 45 people from 'Y' go to 'Z'. So there aren't really the 225 more gamers that they thought there were. I love the passion for getting together but there needs to be a true understanding about what it takes to host a LAN.
