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Just a bunch of idiots having fun: a photo history of the LAN party

arstechnica.com

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Re: Just a bunch of idiots having fun: a photo history of the LAN party

#91

Post by bcrosby95 »

dudul wrote: post #27
RGamma wrote: post #22

Ahh the careless and hopeful days... Blissfully ignorant that paradise wouldn't last.

"I wish there was a way to know you're in the good old days before you've actually left them."

You leave them once you're an adult with a job/kids/etc. Kids are having good old days right now. And when they grow up, they will look back fondly at them.

The good old days are not about the times, its about not having many responsibilities, being able to do whatever the hell you want, and being surrounded by friends in a similar situation.

Re: Just a bunch of idiots having fun: a photo history of the LAN party

#93

Post by DefineOutside »

giantg2 wrote: post #76
Gunax wrote: post #37

I think they missed a main factor: lag compensation inproved greatly. The old Quake style games often had very naive networking. Whereas now, I seldom notice the network even exists. It's not that lag has changed much--contrary to the article, broadband is less important in games. It's latency that matters, not bandwidth. Team fortress 1 can run on 16kbps. And latency is still the same as I had 20 uears ago, 50-150ms…

Most of the online games today seem even worse for connection than before. I hear that only Fortnight, CSGO, and Valorant are using good servers.

Even in all online FPS games, due to the client predicting movement - there's still peeker's advantage due to your player being slightly behind on other's screens, so you see enemies before they see you.

This doesn't matter for the majority of players but that's why high skilled CSGO and other shooters must still use LAN for high level play. There's no entirely defeating peeker's advantage and other artifacts from latency.

Valorant, league of legends, and CSGO have their own CDN to try to help with connections. Can't really comment on other game's netcodes because they vary so much. For example, BF1 devs removed lag compensation entirely. League has no lag compensation since it's not a shooter. CSGO lag compensates a fixed amount so consistent ping is more important than fixed ping.

Re: Just a bunch of idiots having fun: a photo history of the LAN party

#94

Post by HarryHirsch »

agrippanux wrote: post #52

Sophomore year in college (‘97) was the height of LAN parties for me. Our dorm building wasn’t wired for internet yet so about 12 of us got together and took it upon ourselves to create our own network. We cajoled the NetOps dept at UCSD to give us old repeaters and bought a ton of BNC wire to connect everyone. Of course the facilities dept didn’t like rogue wiring running all over the massive dorm complex so they wo…

Of course Facilities would remove foreign cabling that crosses firewalls or floors, this is how fire gets across building compartments. It's more baffling that they didn't reach out to the hackers and help them lay cable that conforms to code. Sometimes you run into EH&S types who prefer to "enforce" standards instead of "uphold" them, and that should be a red flag and a signal to run into the other direction. (Ask how I know.)

Re: Just a bunch of idiots having fun: a photo history of the LAN party

#95

Post by spiritplumber »

HarryHirsch wrote: post #94
agrippanux wrote: post #52

Sophomore year in college (‘97) was the height of LAN parties for me. Our dorm building wasn’t wired for internet yet so about 12 of us got together and took it upon ourselves to create our own network. We cajoled the NetOps dept at UCSD to give us old repeaters and bought a ton of BNC wire to connect everyone. Of course the facilities dept didn’t like rogue wiring running all over the massive dorm complex so they wo…

Of course Facilities would remove foreign cabling that crosses firewalls or floors, this is how fire gets across building compartments. It's more baffling that they didn't reach out to the hackers and help them lay cable that conforms to code. Sometimes you run into EH&S types who prefer to "enforce" standards instead of "uphold" them, and that should be a red flag and a signal to run into the other direction. (Ask h…

In uni we were unhappy with the 10Mbps wiring that was in the engineering lab building and took it upon ourselves to replace it with cat5, which was what was current at the time.

We did the job over a weekend, informed IT the following Wednesday, they said "thanks but no thanks", then we clarified that it had already been done and was already running. Never got an answer but they left it alone.

We also replaced our wifi access points with the ones from the law library when they got the nicer ones, but that was entirely covert :)

Re: Just a bunch of idiots having fun: a photo history of the LAN party

#96

Post by donatj »

I really miss user-run servers. Back in the Quake 3 days I had a couple favorite servers and there were always the same couple groups of people around, known characters. You don’t get that sense of camaraderie from random matching.

This is somewhat Quake 3 specific but I also really miss user generated maps that would just automatically download. Played some really interesting maps back in the day.

Re: Just a bunch of idiots having fun: a photo history of the LAN party

#97

Post by net_ »

donatj wrote: post #96

I really miss user-run servers. Back in the Quake 3 days I had a couple favorite servers and there were always the same couple groups of people around, known characters. You don’t get that sense of camaraderie from random matching. This is somewhat Quake 3 specific but I also really miss user generated maps that would just automatically download. Played some really interesting maps back in the day.

Popular games switching from pub servers to matchmade 5v5/6v6 bums me out. It feels like it was just done to chase esports money, and it's such a worse casual experience. Way more stress, way less community.

Re: Just a bunch of idiots having fun: a photo history of the LAN party

#98

Post by godzillabrennus »

donatj wrote: post #96

I really miss user-run servers. Back in the Quake 3 days I had a couple favorite servers and there were always the same couple groups of people around, known characters. You don’t get that sense of camaraderie from random matching. This is somewhat Quake 3 specific but I also really miss user generated maps that would just automatically download. Played some really interesting maps back in the day.

This is why I like CS:Source a lot still. User run servers but they have updated the graphics enough it doesn’t feel too dated compared with newer titles.

Re: Just a bunch of idiots having fun: a photo history of the LAN party

#99

Post by adlpz »

Waterluvian wrote: post #75

I… HATED… all the things that made LAN parties chaotic and dirty. I don’t have fond memories of piles of garbage or spending half our time getting everyone on the same version of a game or whatnot. Eventually we matured and realized that keeping the place clean was a good idea. Pre-planning the game list, pre-testing them online, etc. and having an actual bedtime (3am) all helped.

I very much respect your view but i couldn't resist commenting on... how insane all that sounds to me. Chaos was, for me, the essence of an epic, memorable LAN party.

It's fun to see how different people can be.

Re: Just a bunch of idiots having fun: a photo history of the LAN party

#100

Post by coldpie »

elif wrote: post #50
thrown_22 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Split screen was never a part of lan parties. The reason why lan parties stopped was because it was hard to move a tower around. Even during that period it was much easier to go to a lanshop and play there either as in lan or on the proto cloud servers they had. Many fond memories of early battle.net and much fewer of steam.

That's just not true. All but a handful of the smallest LAN parties I attended I the 90's and early 00's included console gaming. It was pretty much assumed there would be consoles at a LAN. Halo, which was arguably the first professionally competitive game, had it's entire birth at LAN parties as it did not support online play at all and had to be done with a LAN. Smash brothers had a similar Genesis story at LAN pa…

> To get everyone at the LAN to play the same game no longer meant passing the CD around

Pretty sure I spent more time installing games and fighting with cracking software than I did playing games at LANs :)

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