I feel like ranting for a bit so take all of this with a grain of salt. Lot's of going back and forth and incoherent rambling and I probably have flaws in my way of thinking, sleepless nights because of my 2nd son who is now 3 weeks old :D

Let's talk about LAN events and gatherings. I've been watching the FOM LAN in Belgium since they wrote an article about the in promptu Quake Live tournament. This edition they have announced it in advance, and to my modest opinion they also arranged a nice prizepool worth € 809,89, according to their website + € 6 via donations.

What you need to know is that this is the biggest LAN party of Belgium. No other LAN event is able to draw 1000 players in this small country. This time, they have promoted Quake Live to be 1 of their Grand Compos. FYI, Starcraft 1v1 is a "normal compo" in their 3 tier system, so they are putting some trust into Quake Live. This has something to do with a little bit of lobbying to include what the general gaming population calls a dieing game that has a handful of players worldwide, if they've even heard of it. If this keeps failing as it is now, QL will be demoted from the top tier to their lowest tier in no time or even disappear from their list.

I'm a member of a non-profit event organiser, we only do LAN parties bi-anually - no other events, and you'll probably remember the Quake Live competition that I tried to set up at one of our LAN parties. There's a lot of work behind the scenes and the main concern was that the announcement was made too late. We announced it like we always do, 3 months in advance. This means that at the time of the announcement we need to have the major guidelines set up. What do we want to achieve? How many players do we expect to attract? How can we accomodate international players? Our venue is in an international sweet-spot. It's very accessible via all sorts of transportation. Since we are a non-profit organiser which puts every earned cent back into the next edition we didn't have a lot of room to announce large cash prizepools so after some discussion we settled on 125€ and tried to get more via donations, which ultimately also failed due to no interest.

What we did in the months before the event was negotiating with nearby hotels for a discounted price and we were lucky to find that the nearest hotel offered the best price and we got a tour there that satisfied any concerns. We managed to get a nice discount and sharing a room was allowed, but in the end not a single room was booked and we lost credibility there. We never made promises of a high occupancy of their rooms but they were very excited to work with us and this made it harder for us to get the same kind of deal again.

I knew it was important to get PC's at the venue so international players wouldn't have to luggage their computers with them across Europe so we made a deal with a local gamecenter to provide quality PC's and monitors. Unfortunately a while after we announced our competition the owner of the gamecenter told us he had been thinking about the cooperation and he couldn't see any profit coming out of it for him. So completely out of the blue he pulled and we didn't hear from him again after that. This put us in a tough spot because we had already announced our event. The work put in the preperation, the discussions we had wether it was a good idea or not to host QL, I didn't want to throw that effort away so we started searching for a replacement which we eventually found. The bad news was that it were laptops. This was a sponsor that was already providing us with cash prizes for other competitions as well as hardware prizes and equipment. We were greatly thankful but the Quake community wasn't.

We always had Quake at the event, it was always Quake 3 and it always had 4 to 6 signups and a prize almost not worth mentioning. As a Quake player I started a discussion with my team mates. I told them about the community, the state of the game, the need for more fun (!) events and gatherings and I managed to convince them and they were very excited to host what should have been a European gathering of Quake players. Did we expect 100 people to show up? Definitely not, we had 32 seats reserved for Quake out of our 200 seat setup. We did expect between 16 and 32 players.

Now let's get back to FOM. Greth has been putting some effort into organising this. What's going wrong here? Is it the organization? Are Quakers focussing on too high standards? I feel the players are looking at each other waiting for the other one to make a move. The event should be near perfect, which is never possible for a game with a community of this size. My major problem with FOM is that they are hosting their event in a bad location for international players. If you're Belgian it's not much of a problem but the public transport in that region is piss-poor compared to the venue we had. They have a capacity of 1000+ while we can only hold 800+ seats. My opinion is that they should move, but they probably have a very nice deal with the venue which is also very important of course.

Is it the correct way to go to split Quake from this event and do it on it's own? I don't think there's a large enough "market" for it to work and there's a lot of factors that can make things go awry. There are also obviously trust issues. Who is this organiser? If I donate, how do I know that he's not going to just run off with the money? I tried to resolve this by getting memento_mori to handle the donations but it still didn't work out (due to other reasons). By attaching a Quake Live event to an already established event it makes it easier for us organisers to get sponsors on board. It's easier to say "oh and by the way, we are also doing this event, can we work something out" rather than saying "we want to do a Quake event only". All they care about is exposure and I'm not saying it's not possible, I'm just saying it's a lot easier to lift on the back of a larger event. In this case that event would be FOM, but it could also be DreamHack, Insomnia or the much smaller Storm. It allows the other attendends to discover the game. They are playing League of Legends and Counter-Strike. They are between 14 and 18 years old and they have never seen anyone get serious about Quake because when they were old enough to play their friends played other things. I think supporting Quake at existing events and putting it in that market there is what can make it grow the most. And not only for Quake of course, but the whole arena FPS genre.

I was walking around on LAN talking with people about the event and I mentioned Reflex. No one's even heard of it in the general gaming populace. What do we do here? Do we push for Reflex as the target arena FPS or do we keep Quake as the definitive arena shooter? The community is already small and hosting more than 1 arena FPS during an event is already a stretch. It can be done, purely for fun. I don't know a lot of players in this genre who want to get together for a local tournament and it's not going to attract a lot of players outside of the locals and so the interest diminishes.

Showing your support is extremely important. Not being there because your favorite gamemode is not played? I understand completely, but you're killing it. When I organised Quake at The Storm the intention was to keep it permanently in the compo list. Alternating the team mode between TDM and CTF every edition. People explicitly said they wouldn't show up if it was going to be CTF and they wanted TDM, and others said they wouldn't show up if it was going to be TDM and they wanted CTF. When then signups turned out to be near 0 for TDM and duel I tried to switch it around to CTF but it was already too late. That was a big mistake on my end but I'm still not sure what I should have done. It's not a lack of leadership as I stayed persistant on TDM for quite a while but there comes a moment where you have to make the decision to throw things around and try to salvage what is in your head an awesome event. A community gathering. Getting to know the real person behind the name. That was the intention of the Storm LAN.

I see the same thing happening for FOM and they have more resources than we did at Storm. I'm not sure if the argument that they didn't communicate enough can stand because they post a lot of information on their website and everything that you needed to know was available. Quake needs to be more prominent in LAN events, not only online events.




Let's dream big.