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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

#161

Post by giantg2 »

krolden wrote: post #68
TravHatesMe wrote: post #8

Gaming companies contributed to the death of LAN parties too. They killed the "split-screen" gameplay that would support 2-4 players on the same machine. They wanted each player to require their own copy of the game. They killed LAN support, forcing you to play on their servers. Culturally we saw a shift towards social isolation. People are more comfortable talking over a mic.

I'm happy about the death of split screen gaming. It was just an awful experience. Especially when your friends were screenlookers

We'd run 2-4 consoles in separate areas, with each console being a team.

As a kid split screen adversarial was common, and the screen looking was never really an issue. If someone was better, you'd play 1v2, 1v3, or 2v2 with the best and worst player on the same team.

If you were at a LAN party and were too good, then it was you and the worst kid on one console vs 4-6 kids on the other 2 consoles. Haha good times.

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

#162

Post by giantg2 »

prawn wrote: post #44
Mistletoe wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the greatest gaming experiences of my life is when I and my three younger brothers hooked up two original Xboxes with a network crossover cable and played the original Halo 2v2 split screen in separate rooms. Split screen LAN may not have been the norm but it is fantastic.

We had four on a projector in a room, and then another couple down the corridor on a TV. Glorious. Lots of yelling between rooms. After each game, the stats screen would motivate all sorts of trash talking. 20 years later, we still talk about the time someone called out at the friend with the lowest shots fired count: "You know the bullets don't cost anything, right?" I can never understand why modern CoD lacks so ma…

Halo Infinite greatly reduced post game stats too.

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

#163

Post by astrange »

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.

Fighting games have gotten much better due to rollback - Japanese developers for years would release games that were just unusable outside Japan and now it’s fine.

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

#164

Post by bartimus »

giantg2 wrote: post #157
bartimus wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would everyone bring their TV set?

Yep Edit: each person bringing a console also brought a TV. We would have up to 4 people per console.

Ah, split screen. No option for covert strategies.

I guess many people stopped investing into expensive pc gaming rigs when consoles became more popular. And work provided them with a Windows laptop.

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

#165

Post by DrSiemer »

fxtentacle wrote: post #127
jwie wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I definitley think it's on the product side that LAN parties died. The relationship between the player and the game, and the LAN community and the game were way different. Gradually the companies figured out how to inject themselves into the social structure. Your relationships became mediated by these products. Rather than a social lubricant they became the relationship itself. They monetized that social capital. Yo…

Fully agree. I still regularly organize LAN parties with the same crew as back then. 24 years and counting... Family has made finding a suitable date much more difficult. But the biggest obstacle is finding LAN-capable games. 10 people joining Dota 2 from the same IP results in instant ban for everyone. StarCraft 2 is horribly laggy when 10 PCs compete for UDP traffic to the internet server. GTA 5 keeps load-balancin…

OpenRA is the only thing that really works for an ad hoc LAN party on whatever laptops we have with us when we get together with the old crew.

We join over public servers, so we skip the classic LAN curse (spending an entire day getting it all connected properly, then only having time left for maybe 1 or 2 rounds of actual play).

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

#166

Post by sizzle »

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…

Nice were you in Revelle?

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

#167

Post by giantg2 »

bartimus wrote: post #164
giantg2 wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep Edit: each person bringing a console also brought a TV. We would have up to 4 people per console.

Ah, split screen. No option for covert strategies. I guess many people stopped investing into expensive pc gaming rigs when consoles became more popular. And work provided them with a Windows laptop.

"Ah, split screen. No option for covert strategies."

Not so. Each console/TV was a team. So you could only see your teammates.

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

#168

Post by wink »

TravHatesMe wrote: post #8

Gaming companies contributed to the death of LAN parties too. They killed the "split-screen" gameplay that would support 2-4 players on the same machine. They wanted each player to require their own copy of the game. They killed LAN support, forcing you to play on their servers. Culturally we saw a shift towards social isolation. People are more comfortable talking over a mic.

I don't think I remember ever playing a single game via split screen on a LAN party (except that one year someone brought an... N64?).

The server thing is true though, also just not paying for dialup by the minute.

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

#169

Post by andrewmcwatters »

DefineOutside wrote: post #93
giantg2 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 la…

It has nothing to do with their network infrastructure and everything to do with the way they calculate player movement, input, and perform lag compensation.

Here's another surprise for you: although Fortnite and Valorant are on Unreal, they don't use the default multiplayer networking code. You can't create a reliable game with it.

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

#170

Post by LtWorf »

boomboomsubban wrote: post #114
LtWorf wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Games explicitly allowed you to play in like 3-4 using the same CD code. Now you need all the friends to buy the same (usually expensive) game.

I don't know if they explicitly allowed it, it seems more likely the CD code was only checked locally so there wasn't much the game could do to stop code sharing.

No it was even specified in the manual that above X players you needed 2 players with the game in the CD reader at the same time.
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