Gamers' Gauntlet III - History

Welcome
With Gamers' Gauntlet III came a new location and a new set of challenges for the staff to make this event happen. When our old location became economically unviable we looked for a place in the Raleigh area where we could hold a multi-day LAN while keeping our entry fee the same as past parties. The Comfort Suites was a good fit that met our requirements with a few drawbacks: we could only have a two day event and fit 72 people in the room. Due to our power, space, and price requirements we decided it was better to have a smaller, shorter party than wait a month or two to find and plan a bigger event. Planning this party has shown the staff that we can replicate the success of our previous locations and parties and deliver our participants the opportunity to have a great LAN experience. With that said, I think it's safe to say that Gamers' Gauntlet III was a success.

Setup
"Doors open in T-minus two hours and counting!" We couldn't get into the room until 12 noon Friday, at which point we had two hours to setup the power box, run power and networking, setup registration, and prep the server equipment. It was tight, but we were able to get everything done and ready by doors' opening.

Power
Some of you might have noticed that the power box from Burlington was missing from this event. We had a different rig running this time. We had zero power problems except for a table that had eleven PC's instead of eight--which just flipped a breaker.

Network
This was the first party that offered seamless Internet access to our attendees. It was met with mixed success. WEB/IRC/E-Mail access was nice and Aetius loved it as he could download all the drivers needed to rebuild his PC (DOH!). On the flip side, some people were playing Internet games instead of hanging on the internal LAN servers that we provided.

We had an issue in the RtCW and the Quake3 tourneys with lag which actually turned out to be a problem with the server. It seems that for some reason, the machine was maxing out on CPU utilization with more than two-eight player Quake3 CTF servers. It was also doing the same thing with just one 12 person RtCW server. Once the servers were moved to another host, the networking lag issue was resolved.

Servers
We probably had the most server power available to the party of any previous party. A dual P3-933, dual Xeon-550, an AMD 1.4GHz, P3-733, and a P3-550, all with 512MBs of RAM (or better) and most running Linux. We're still running into the problem of being able to bind Quake3 games to virtual IP's and have them broadcast to the internal Q3 browser...our next party may have to use Windows 2000 on the backend :>

There was a problem with people playing on public Internet servers instead of local servers...but that wasn't for every game. There was still a ton of local action and people having fun. In a lot of ways I had more fun at this LAN than previous due to the variety and constant playing that was going on.

Tournaments Wrap-up
The RtCW tournament was the first tournament of the LAN. What worked at the server test two weeks earlier failed to work as expected in practice. I ended up downloading (gj Internet connect) the BOB RtCW Server config's and restarting the server. I also had to switch servers as the Dual-550 Xeon wasn't balancing the server over both CPUs and, as a result, the one 12 player game we were running was saturating one CPU. After moving it to the 933, everything was fine. I was surprised to not see more RtCW teams but enjoyed playing just the same.

The Quake3 tournament was held on Saturday. Most of the teams that were there had been to previous G2s, so the tourney went off smoothly and without a hitch. Everyone seemed to enjoy selecting from the new map list with almost all of the matches being played from one of the eight maps.

Trophies and Prizes
This time around we made a switch from handing out plaque trophies to handing out dog tags that showing the event name, tourney, and place. Everyone seem to really dig them and I can vouch that they're a lot more portable than the plaques, hehe.

The prizes were pretty cool. We had two cool GearGrip's denoted by GearGrip for our event, some way cool T-shirts (Simon Says - You Suck!), and other various prizes that were cool. Tranz took home the honorary Pimpbot prize of "Kleenex/Baby Oil".

Corrections and Submissions
If you have a correction or objection to anything posted here please email me at
time2die@gamersgauntlet.com

Thanks!
Thanks to everyone that came who made this one of the best parties ever and all of the G2 staff for all of the countless hours put into making this event possible.