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Other Invitation to my (Northern) LAN Party!

Discussion in 'General' started by bigc90210, 15 Nov 2016.

  1. bigc90210

    bigc90210 Teh C

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    Hi everyone, wasn't sure to put this in general, gaming or for sale! Anwyays...

    After about 2 years of saving up / getting hardware / networking gear / everything else I'm proud to say my first LAN Party is booked in terms of venue, and tickets are on sale!

    N-LAN:1 Will be on the 22nd and 23rd of April at Newcastle Civic Centre.



    We've been working really hard to bring N-LAN:1 within reach of everyone, and we're delighted to announce you can now save up to 20% from the original ticket price! We now support BACS payments so no more booking fees! Tickets are priced at £39.99 for a weekend pass.

    So now you can attend for less, meaning more money for pizza and snacks!

    Find out more and book your tickets at http://www.northern-lan.co.uk/n-lan-1-now-even-cheaper/

    More news on the event as well as Game Servers that will be hosted there soon!

    Tickets can be purchased here

    Related Links:
    Facebook Page
    What's On
    Facebook Event Page (I'd really appreciate likes/shares/event invites to gamer friends to this to raise interest)
    Northern Gamers UK FB Page meet some other players who are going

    Blog 1 - Founding 50
    Blog 2 - Servers
    Blog 3 - Advertising
    Blog 4 - Giveaway Time
    N-LAN: 1 – Now Even Cheaper!

    I'd absolutely love to meet a few of you guys there, I know there's a few of you who are aware I've been working on this for ages too so it'd be nice to celebrate it together.

    Apart from BT I'm not really involved with any other gaming / hardware forums, so any shares or spreading of the word if you are a member of another large forum is massively appreciated. Anyways guys thanks for your time, if you aren't a gamer maybe you know one who would be interested and could pass this on!

    Thanks everyone!

    C
     
    Last edited: 22 Jan 2017
    Gooey_GUI likes this.
  2. Gunsmith

    Gunsmith Maximum Win

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    I hate to be that guy but £46 for 2 days lanning is phenomenally expensive. how big is this lan?
     
  3. Gareth Halfacree

    Gareth Halfacree WIIGII! Lover of bit-tech Administrator Super Moderator Moderator

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    £49.97 once you've included Eventbrite's booking fee. I'd say that's fair enough for a LAN with computers provided, but steep if you're bringing your own. Depends on the scale and features, though: Epic.LAN is £57 and has been running for years, so there are people out there clearly willing to pay that even if you and I wouldn't.

    C, have you got some more information? What does the entry fee include? Meals? Drinks? Is internet connectivity provided? What speed? How many attendees are you expecting? Will there be tournaments, and if so what prizes are available? Any celebrity guests? Professional matches?
     
  4. bigc90210

    bigc90210 Teh C

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    Thanks for your feedback. The current venue capacity is 81, though if we can sell 60 tickets we can move to the bigger venue which holds approx 220. should we sell the 220 we could take both venues, as the larger venue is a banqueting suite and the smaller venue is the room/balcony above the suite - on the condition the larger venue does not get booked by someone else in the meantime. The idea of the Founding 50 is so that we can thank early adopters to our first ever event, and push the event to the larger scale ASAP before it booked elsewhere. We are looking to make this a 3 day event in the future (in which case you'd still pay the £46 for 3 days), though with this being our first event at a new venue we are testing the water in terms of venue etc.

    We survey'd 300 people on price, just over 130 of those surveyed had been to a LAN before. There were several brackets that they were asked to rate between 1-5 (1 very bad value, 5 excellent value) and for the "Ticket including booking fees at £50 or less" the results were as follows

    1 6%
    2 12%
    3 43%
    4 27%
    5 12%

    We currently only only have LAN Attendees as a source of income due to the venue being too small to have spectators. If we hit the milestone of the bigger venue though, we will be allowing spectators which over events could help us subsidise the price of LAN tickets.

    Thanks
     
  5. bigc90210

    bigc90210 Teh C

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    Thanks for your feedback, currently ticket fee is for a BYOC seat for the weekend (server co-loc is free for those who want it) - those currently booking will be eligible for the "Founding 50" offer extras as outlined in the promotion, so their prices shall be fixed for all future events too, even if we move to a 3 day LAN. Internet connection is currently 120/20 which I am in talks with the venue to up to 300/60. With regards to "How many attendees" is a bit of a black box in all honesty. At maximum capacity we could house around 300 players if we were to get both venues (see above post) though at present our room capacity is 81, until we sell enough tickets to expand to the bigger venue. We are looking to provide small scale tournaments on all of the games listed in our "Whats On" page, though due to the nature of this being our first event we are looking to our participants to tell us what they want to play/see so we can put it on for them. We will be looking to move away from eventbrite for future events as to avoid their charges, though for our first event we needed a reliable secure simple payment/ticket engine, which is why we went with them.

    This is our first small-scale promotion of the event while we finalise things with our sponsors. Hopefully all sponsors should be confirmed in the next few weeks, then we can start announcing prizes, finalising tournaments and the likes. We are looking also to get some YouTubers/Guests in too. As for professional matches we don't have anything concrete yet, though its likely there to be at least a CS:GO 5v5, possibly Left 4 Dead 2, Fifa and whatever the players feedback to us in the coming months. Once we have sponsors and tournaments lined up, we will be advertising on a much bigger scale.

    Due to it being the first event and a lot of things being new there is an incredible amount of work going on behind the scenes to make it a success, and lots of "first time" expenses and things we are taking care of. We have a rack of servers which we are looking to ensure can provide a good solid LAN experience, with Gigabit networking throughout. We are a small team with plenty of LAN experience though this is our first time starting something from scratch, so we are doing all we can to give this a good start and hopefully make a success out of it and get established so we can constantly improve over future events.

    Thanks
     
  6. Gareth Halfacree

    Gareth Halfacree WIIGII! Lover of bit-tech Administrator Super Moderator Moderator

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    Cheers for the additional information. These two bits, though, jumped out at me: on the one hand you seem to be saying the price is high because of one-off expenses (like servers and what have you) that won't apply to future events, but on the other that the price is likely to go up in the future and the first 50 will be locking in the current lower price. Okay, that may work out to the best if you move to a three-day model - but that's an if. I'd be a bit peed off if I'd payed £50 this year as a founder member to lock in the 'cheaper' price and then the ticket prices next year were £30...

    My advice? I think you need to drop the price. Don't try to defray equipment costs over a single event; price it out so that you'll pay off the servers and other hardware over the next X events, otherwise you're shafting your first comers.

    EDIT: This would appear to bear out my thinking:

    So, if 1 is "terrible value" and 5 is "excellent value," that makes 3 "neither good nor bad." That means that 61 per cent of your target audience, the majority, believe £50 a ticket to be less than good value; only 39% believe it to be good value or better.
     
    Last edited: 16 Nov 2016
  7. bigc90210

    bigc90210 Teh C

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    Thanks for that, to clarify it was more to indicate that if we can get enough support and tickets sold to move to a 3 day event, then it would be beneficial for those who have initially supported. Not that we have the second/third event set in stone as of yet, though I'd imagine if the event did expand to a 3 day event at some point, then the general implications of staffing/venue/security/the other incurred expenses for a 3rd day would mean the price would reflect that and would be a little higher. However on the flip side of this i'd imagine there would be a lot of extra stuff going on / facilities etc available the same for anything that is getting bigger and better. Once we can move away from Eventbrite, it will shave around 7% from the price of a ticket, and no doubt we will be exploring other methods of discount down the line for future events too.

    Edit (Editing after seeing your edit haha): We actually had number 3 labelled as "Reasonable" (2 being poor and 4 being good), So we took our feedback as 82% seen the ticket price as reasonable or better, with 39% thinking it was good or great, with 18% thinking it was not good value. We made the assumption that if someone was to classify something as reasonably priced or better, then they would be inclined to try it out if it was within their interests.
     
    Last edited: 16 Nov 2016
  8. Gareth Halfacree

    Gareth Halfacree WIIGII! Lover of bit-tech Administrator Super Moderator Moderator

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    Ah, that's not how I would have made the scale: that way you've got three positive options, two negative options, and no neutral option, which naturally skews the result in favour of the positive. Standard five-point scale is "strongly disagree, disagree, neither agree nor disagree, agree, strongly agree," which gives you two negatives, two positives, and a neutral. As it stands, anyone who thought that the price was neither reasonable nor unreasonable had nowhere to go - and they'll have been more likely to say "reasonable" as the friendly option than the aggressive "poor," assuming that they truly have no strong opinion on the matter.
     
  9. bigc90210

    bigc90210 Teh C

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    Thats an absolutely valid point, I'd never thought of it that way. I'd seen "reasonable" not a positive term or negative term, but as a middle ground of not standing as particularly good or bad. I agree the way you have worded it is better, going forward I will ensure we definitely use this wording in the future.
     
  10. RedFlames

    RedFlames ...is not a Belgian football team

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    Again, also not wanting to be 'that guy'...

    A BYOC LAN... in Newcastle Civic Centre... are you mad? It's possibly one of the worst places i can think of to host something like that... I've looked at hosting events there in the past and no... just no...

    Was kinda interested until I saw the price... and then the venue killed what little interest remained...
     
  11. Cookie Monster

    Cookie Monster Multimodder

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    Way to piss on a lads chips. Where else would you suggest which would be easily accessible? Granted it people were coming in to Central Station its a bit of a walk, but there is Haymarket Metro / Bus Depot at the end of the street, there is parking. I would imagine that a number of people who would normally attend a LAN party would have all the logistics of moving there PC sorted.

    You have to give the lad a bit of credit for getting off his lazy arse and doing something (I speak from experience here, I went to college with him maybe 15yr ago).

    Well done C. I really hope it works for you. Any networking problems give Arthur a shout. :worried:
     
  12. bigc90210

    bigc90210 Teh C

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    Hello! sorry for the late reply, been working on a lot of stuff related to the event as well as home life.

    The criteria we had for selecting a venue were:

    Internet Connectivity
    Security
    Power Capacity
    Table/Chairs
    Open 24 Hours
    Secure Car Parking
    Accessible
    Close to the city
    Allows players to bring their own food
    Bar as a bonus

    and the Civic checked pretty much all of those boxes. Why do you think it is a bad choice of venue? It by far wasn't the cheapest venue but we seen it as the best of what we looked at so hence we went with it. Do you know of another venue which may be better/cheaper and meets that criteria? Just we spent months looking/viewing places and it seems hard to come by, but any suggestions for future events are more than welcomed.
     
  13. bigc90210

    bigc90210 Teh C

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    Hi all, as an update to the event we have been working really hard to take your feedback on board, and we have implemented BACS for ticket bookings on the website meaning No Booking Fees!.

    We have also reduced the price of weekend tickets from £46.50 to £39.99, so if you were to book your ticket on our website using BACS it would be 20% cheaper than before. <£20 a day lanning is surely worth it in anyones books?

    Anyways guys thanks for the feedback, looking back over this thread you can't get it right first time every time, but that's the reason you ask for feedback right? :lol:

    More to be announced in the coming weeks, I have a meeting with a potential sponsor tomorrow so exciting times ahead!

    Thanks

    C
     
  14. davido_labido

    davido_labido Your Alphacool Contact.

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    If I can get there, I might be up for this! I will have to check my workload and make sure one of my computers is up to standard, but other than that the only other thing I need is travel!
     
  15. bigc90210

    bigc90210 Teh C

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    Would be brilliant to see you there!
     

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