It's that time again to give staff our feedback and i just want to say thanks for another Great AWOL!!!!! GOOD JOB!!!

ps: I cross posted over at AWOL facebook page.


Sign-in: The only change was that you couldn't sign-in early and setup if you arrived early that you had to wait till 10 am, and i don't mind that at all. I think it's a good idea! I know before some aspects were not ready like the AC food cards and that caused more back pedaling then anything. The only thing i hope doesn't change is being able to at least put your stuff near your spot if you come early, then maybe you won't have any congestion of stuff coming in all at once?


Power/Internet: For myself the internet, interwebs and power was rock solid, no issues at all.


Fellow Gamers: Everyone around me was pleasant, in personality and odor

Meals: The only issue i had was when i went to "The Pub" i did not care for the taste of the burgers at all, i'm glad i had "The Monkey in the Middle" to fall back on!

Tournaments/Gaming: The only issue i had was my unreadiness for League of Legends and Minecraft

Air Quality: Comfortable temperatures and no gaming Pew, Pew

Really? I didn't mind their burgers at all. Pretty tasty in fact. I also had one of their French Dips the next day and it wasn't too bad either. As for the LAN, I do not like the fact that the situation with the tickets keeps changing. Last time there were more blue ticket prizes and the red tickets were saved for the really big items, such as the TV. This year, most prizes were given away with red tickets and the blue ticket items were mostly phone cases, with a couple standouts, like the power supply and the Novint Falcon. And anything that involves T-shirts needs at least a few that are of a bigger size, for people like me. I had already liked WASD game servers but didn't bother going for a shirt because I was told that they only had up to X-Large available.

Hooray.

PreLAN: Building up the LAN I have little to complain about. Most of my questions could be answered here on the forums, Twizted took care of seat swapping like a pro and you guys held some pre-lan events such as the going to the movies activities (which I unfortunately didn't get to go to). If I had any complaints its that the official tournament rules weren't finalized until a scant few days before the tournament. Also if no one had told me I would of had no idea about the waiver that was required this year. I scoured my email and it looks like I never recieved the pre-lan email.

PreReg: I got in about 9:45 and was able to set all my stuff at my seat. Registration was held off until the official lan start which I didn't mind at all. The carts we're readily available and there was plenty of space to set up. Everything seemed tip top and ran smoothly.

LANStaff: You guys we're awesome as usual. Any and all questions or concerns I had we're answered/fixed almost immediately. Thank you all for organizing another great event.

LANTournaments: I competed in CSS, CO4, Minecraft (sorta), Dots Construction, and was signed up for TF2.

The TF2 tournament not happening was a bit of a disappointment but in no way the organizers fault.

Dots was fun but to many people learned their lesson from last year and our poor "build it sturdy and let everyone else's fall over" strategy didn't stand a chance.

Also unfortunately, The Minecraft tournament and dots competition overlapped. So I had to give up on it shortly after starting.

COD4 lots of fun. The mod we used changed the behavior of the weapons a bit, making them a little more powerful, which was a good thing IMO.

Source was a blast as we only played 4v4 our first match and then got to adopt one of the opposing players for the second. Last year we experienced some small amounts of lag, however this time everything was butter smooth (is that a phrase "butter smooth"? No? Well it is now).

TournamentSuggestions:
TF2: Even though we didn't get to actually play, the blacklist for weapons was way to lax. Many weapons that are typically banned in most competitive formats were aloud.
CSS: Highlight of the tournament for me. My only real complaint is playing Train, one of my least favorite competitive maps. It'd be nice if we could get cpl_mill or cpl_strike on the map list next time. Also more players would have been awesome.
COD4: Handled much better then the UT2k4 was. The boil-off system worked much better then just having the winner be the top fragger out of 16 players in a single server. It would have been nice to have the server up for a while before the lan so that players could get used to the mod we'd be using.
Minecraft: I had no idea what I was doing. Only problem I encountered was figuring out exactly how to make a death chest (demonstration next time would be nice) and no one pointed out the rules on the other side of the paper.
Dots: None.
OtherTournament Suggestions: A couple more solo tournaments would have been awesome. The go really quick so you could squeeze one or two in in an hours time relatively easily. Quake 3 (Quake Live is free after all), or Warsaw (completely free Quake/UT hybrid clone) would both be excellent arena shooters for this . Also the tournament rules could of been finalized a bit sooner.
Prizes: Ah prizes. It's hard to complain when you win a really nice one for once but I must regardless. There we're way way way to many hardware specific prizes in the second drawing. Yes I'm talking about all of the nifty screen covers. The thing is, they left only 4 or 5 prizes everyone was interested in getting their hands on. I don't think AWOL themselves should have to field more prizes but I think it would be nice if we could get a few more people to donate. I want to save up some money and try and put a mouse pad or something into the prize pool.
The TV drawing (random number generator) was a lot better to since it gave everyone a chance to win even if they red ticketed a prize earlier.

Action City: Awesome establishment. I upgraded to MRE after I arrived and got the unlimited soda and $25 card. I recommend it to everyone because you already get the 2 meals and can get what ever you want for food from Monkey in the Middle and DQ over the lan. I also put $5 on another card to play the arcade (horray Time Crisis). Despite being fall instead of February the room was also cooler then 19 was.

Internet: Downloads on the net and network were great but for what ever reason the pings on outside servers we're a little higher then last year.

Overall: Awesome and many synonyms of awesome. I had fun, I won a great prize and I got to hang out with many many friends for some 30 odd hours. I can't wait for the next one =D

Even though I showed up 14 hours late I still had a pretty decent time. I didn't get to participate in any of the tournaments so I can't comment on those, unfortunately. My only regret is getting a little too carried away with Minecraft because I wound up snubbing my friends on a couple of LAN games (but hey, my castle is really starting to look awesome!). I look forward to AWOL 21 and doing some LAN gaming!

My son, Easy Jr, and I had a great time again! This is turning into the "must attend" gaming event the staff had envisioned over the years . I have no complaints at all. From my seat, the LAN ran like a well oiled machine!

All ready have my calendar marked for February!

OMG WALL OF TEXT

I'd like to thank the staff for putting in the work to make this happen once again. For some reason they keep doing it, despite us attendees giving them so many reasons not to.

Now for the part where I give them reasons not to.

Actually, it's not too bad. I only have a couple complaints, and I wouldn't even call them complaints so much as things to look into.

First, one of the games I play the most is BF3. If you played BF3 much at the lan you probably saw one of two issues. The first was some lag which made flying jets a real adventure at times. I'm not sure what exactly was causing this. Normally I would suspect the usual lan culprits, torrenting and steam updates, but after I first noticed this lag I asked Durka if the "tubes" were clogged and it didn't sound like he was seeing any congestion. So maybe look into this a little bit. The other issue I saw was that PB was kicking me for "No packet flow". I'm 99% sure that this was being caused by the way the traffic was being split between modems. Basically, if the external IP that you use to connect to the EA master server is different than the one you use to connect to the game server, PB thinks you aren't sending traffic and kicks you. This could be resolved by configuring your network so that traffic sent from an internal address consistently exits the network from the same external address. This might not be super high priority, but it may fix some other issues.

Second issue, noise. Specifically, speaker noise. Currently speakers are allowed if they are kept to a reasonable volume. But even if people weren't intentionally cranking it to an unreasonable volume (which they were at times), people aren't always going to agree on what reasonable means. So, idk, maybe ban speakers? Or maybe try to enforce the rule better? I know this might not seem like a big deal, but with a room this big sometimes the only way to communicate is via TS, Vent, Skype, etc. And that doesn't work so good when your teammates can't hear you over your neighbor's dubstep.

Third, and lastly, player to player communication. By that I mean, communicating to other random attendees that a random game of whatever is starting. Maybe we could get a shoutbox for game announcements only, and then devote a portion of the screen space on the projectors to showing that? Idk? I see the fragmented player base as one of the biggest hurdles facing a lan of this size and I don't see a perfect solution to this popping up overnight, but I think it's something worth looking into. I have an idea that I think would work pretty well, but it would require some coding and a little work. If Twizted wants to take on a pain in the butt project, he knows where to find me.

Now, to respond to a couple things other people have posted.

No offense intended when I say this (and you know I mean it because I have been in those shoes), but the overall prize pool just wasn't quite as large/good as some years. It's not because staff didn't try to get sponsors. I would assume it's mostly due to economics, changing marketing strategies, and possibly due to some sponsor relations difficulties. The point is, it's always a crapshoot what sponsors will give us and staff is always looking into new possibilities. If you or the business you work for would care to sponsor the lan, just shoot Dutch a message and I imagine he will follow up on that. I remember when there were gift cards to McDonalds and Famous Daves because staff and/or attendees worked there and were able to make that happen and it was awesome. Let's make that kind of thing happen more.

For those who don't like or are just confused by the split between red and blue ticket prizes, let me explain a few general rules that staff seem to follow, and then their decisions might make a little more sense. First, if a sponsorship item is something that is only useful to certain people (like a cover for a specific model of phone, a custom WoW character figurine, a game time card for a specific game), then it will probably end up in the blue ticket category; and that's so people don't end up with an item that's of absolutely no use to them. Doesn't that make sense? Second, if an item is considered "good" or "valuable", it will probably end up in the red ticket pool, sometimes even if it's not something that everyone can use (like a Charter gift card). This is so that everyone has an equal chance at getting some of the "good" stuff. Third, if something is valuable, but there are multiples of it, then some of the duplicates go into the blue pool. That way there will be a chance that anyone could win that type of item, but also give people some motivation to acquire blue tickets. Obviously, these rules aren't completely firm. If the ratio of blue to red doesn't seem right, some might get shifted one way or the other.

So, if it seemed like there weren't as many "good" items in the blue pool, it wasn't just because there were so many phone protectors to give away, it was probably also because less sponsors donated multiples of the "good" items they sponsored.

TL;DR

Thanks! Good job! Blah blah, rah rah.

I agree..... I was hoping mumble game based channels would help, but it didn't really. Maybe instead of having alot of different channels, just have one lobby channel that everyone logs into? But you would have to get everyone to use mumble and i think that's easier said then done.

I would use it if I had a working headset. The left earpiece on my GameSkull crapped out for some reason.

On the issue of the speakers/noise, I have been coming for 10 years and this was one of quietest events I have been at. At one point, I stood in the middle of the room and was taken back at how quiet it was. I know a few times someone cranked up some music but overall, it was very quiet.

Just my 2 cents.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bZkp7q1 ... plpp_video

I wish this was played constantly on someone's speakers...

No once was enough, and watching it on your screen the entire LAN was more than enough for me.

That video is freaking AWESOME!

In a train wreck kind of way........

Yeah, it has a good beat! Reminds me of that Technotronic song back in the day, Pump up the Jam.

All in all, I think the LAN went great! The only issue I had was I never got any e-mails from the AWOL staff leading upto this event. As such, I was unable to upgrade my SK (perpaid $20 at the last LAN, was told an e-mail will be sent out which would have instructions to upgrade), and I did not get the prelan e-mail either. The only way I found out about the prelan e-mail was on the forums.

I understand why you don't want people setting up before 10am, because then mroe people will start showing early and the lan would really start at 9am, and you may nor be ready. However, because people were coming at a steady pace at the beginning, carts were available, and there was not the stampede of expensive equipment down the child filled hallways. My only suggestion to this would be ask people to unload behind Action City and come in through one of the back doors, that way, little ones are not going to get trampled or trip you carrying your $$$ rig. Maybe ask Action City if some of those spots could be reserved for the first 3-4 hours of the LAN for unloading only, then people can move their cars to the boonies in the parking lot?

Internet/power: The internet and power was rock solid throughout the event! Great job!

Seats/provided equipment: For some reason, the edge of my table was broken and risen up a couple of inches right where my mouse wrist goes. It was extremely annoying, and if it wasn't for the fact that the person next to me was already set up, I would have torn down and spun the table around to put the broken part against the wall. Also, the ethernet cable was extremely short and I had to put my desktop over in my neighbors area a little so the cable could reach. Lucailly, it looked like everyone else on the table had to do the same thing, so maybe the cable was just not positioned properly?

Smell/temperature: I didn't notice any smell this event. Granted, I was right next to one of the outside doors with one of those large fans, which brings me to temperature. It got a little cold in the room at night, but otherwise it was a nice cool temp throughout the LAN. In Feb, I will be bringing extra blankets and a jacket since I know that room gets cold right by the doors.

Tournaments/SK events: I like how you added several non-PC tournaments this time around; the dots building, the water balloon toss, the Mt. Dew Chug/cup flip, etc. It is nice to have those to get up and walk away from your computer every once and a while. Also, the SK events (go-carts, sprint carts) were awesome as usual. Again, just nice to get up and walk around for a while.

Food/drink: Keep the current set up. I like the food card so I can eat what I want, when I want. Also, the unlimited drinks are great.

Noise: I really didn't mind when people turned their speakers up, as the usually didn't do it at a bad time (sleeping, announcements, etc). However, I think some stricter rules do need to be made about bass. Its one thing to listen to an awesome song really loud, its another to just hear the Wub Wub of some dubstep through your headphones. Out of curiosity, why are speakers even allowed, why not just do headphones only. You guys always talk about how short on power you are, speakers pull extra power when all you need are headphones.

Finally, the staff were friendly and professional as always! I was able to sit down and talk with them about LAN stuff and servers throughout the event. Keep up the great work!

Yeah, there was a cart right up front when I showed up so I was able to unload right away, but when the event ended, I couldn't find a cart to save my life. Ended up having to hoof it for 2 trips instead. Really sucks when you're using a chair without wheels.

As for headphones, there are some people who just don't have them (or in my case, a malfunctioning GameSkull and a preference to not wear headphones for long periods). Should they be penalized just because they may not want a headset, or cannot afford one?