Post LANFest 2K5 review

Has NewEgg lost sight of it's customer base?

July 30-31, Pasadena Convention Center

Overall, the event started out similar to so many other events. Meeting up with friends to carpool. Strategies, details about shared rooms and hoping to sit in the same area as the rest of your gaming buddies.

Of course, not everything goes as planned, but that's Muphy's fault.

-= The Good - B =-

Tournaments

The prizes listed were great!

CounterStrike 1.6 / Source tournaments:

• 1st place - A new AMD Athlon64 4000 system worth about $2200 + $600 each ($3000 total for the team)
• 2nd place - 256 MB X850 XT PCI-E x16 graphics card + $100 each ($500 team total)
• 3rd place - DLink gaming router + $100 each ($500 team total)

Call of Duty

• 1st place - AOpen SFF MZ855-II worth about $350 + $600 each ($3000 team total)
• 2nd place - $250 each
• 3rd place - $150 each

There was a case mod contest, and BYOC tournaments for Unreal 2K4, PainKiller, and Warcraft III.

Plus a lot of t-shirt giveaways, vendor hand-outs, and a swag bag holding more vendor freebies. And not to forget the booth babes and NewEgg girls on-hand to keep the common geek's' attention.

The Swag Bag

• 1 x LANFest 2K5 backpack
• 1 x BFG pen
• 1 x Gigabyte Lanyard
• 1 x NewEgg orange mini-highlighter
• 1 x Skype 30 minute calling card
• 1 x Lexmark die-cast Johnny Lightning car
• 1 x NewEgg event t-shirt
• 2 x NewEgg license plate holder

Event Booth Babes and other Pix

A few of the NewEgg event staff	OCZ BB's and Darcy Donavan, event MC	Katie and Becky behind her, girls that actual game! (And have skillz...)	NewEgg Booth Babes who assist Darcy for raffle prizes.
Do you remember Darcy from Anchorman?	Obelisk, 1st prize in the case mod contest.	A Hummer at the NOS booth	Awards ceremony at 4p Sunday.

The BYOC
400 spots available to all BYOC and tournament pass holders. Although confusing initially, it breaks down to 200 BYOC spots to anyone, and the other 200 spots reserved for any tournament entrants ( (16x5) + (16x5) + (8x5)) = 200.

-= The Bad - D =-

The network was Megabit, but the DNS resolution was problematic when first connecting to a game server on the network. After the first connection to load the IP address in the cached table of each BYOC gamer's machine, things worked more or less without issues.

The air conditioning was apparently having fits, even though the BYOC wasn't even filled to capacity on the first day. 10% no-show is typical of smaller events, but from a quick eye-ball count, at least a third of the seats weren't filled. More on this one later.

The free pizza was edible. The price sure beat the cost of a hotdog ($4), a pretzel ($3) or even a small sandwich ($8) at the Village Cafe. Thankfully, Pepsi Edge, ArrowHead water, and NOS was available to quench a geek's thirst.

Headlining CounterStrike as the tournament and game of choice. As an example, stats from GameSpy indicate that CounterStrike 1.6 is on top. But looking closer at the stats leaves one with the question of why center the event and tournaments on those games?

CounterStrike has made it's mark on the gaming world, but how many of the CS 1.6 players are playing from an internet Cafe / PC Cafe / PC Bang? (Or as Samsung America / Web2Zone / Cyber Square Alliance define it, as a "Cyber Center"?) And how many of those servers are empty? More on this later too.

The BYOC tournaments were haphazard and managed with paper, pen and an Excel spreadsheet. The CS tournament results could be seen on the big screen--a little out of focus and too high a contrast, but readable. The schedule of times were not only off, and easily missed. If you stepped out for a cheaper meal at a surrounding restaurant, then you lost out!

Swag from the stage was given out every 30 minutes - how the heck was a gamer supposed to get their fix? Just kidding, there were lots of shirts, keyboards, mice, etc. given out. Prizes kept on coming. Did I say there were a lot of shirts handed out?

Even the spectators got a chance to get prizes from the giveaways, although I think there should have been a different set of prizes for tournament entrants, BYOC only gamers, and spectators; like three giveaways each time. A little biased, but I think those that actually paid more than $10 and took the time to lug their entire computer systems to the event should have gotten more than the people wearing the spectator bracelets.

Johnathan "Fatal1ty" Wendel was on-hand to dish out severe beatings to anyone that played against him in PainKiller. Granted that's not even a game that shows up on a server stats page. The world's, arguably, top gamer received a challenge to play 1v1 from a local So Cal gamer and LANFest 2K5 attendee, yet dismisses it completely--even if the game was Alien's vs. Predator, you'd think there were skillz to adapt to any FPS created. And even if it's just for bragging rights and in the name of fun. It's one thing for Fatal1ty to consistently beat fellow gamers through a challenge in a game the other gamers may not have knowledge about, but oddly enough, the feeling is uncomfortable when it's handed back. Go figure.

Add this factoid to the heap: Fatal1ty was most likely added to the LANFest on short notice. But a glaring omission, is that the NewEgg LANFest 2K5 doesn't show up in Wendel's calendar of events on his web page.

-= The Ugly - D- (here comes the editorial part) =-

Event entry: difficult if you didn't pre-register. Even more underlined as a Bad Sign, when the first day attendance for the BYOC is one-third empty. Many gamers who were tournament entrants left after their CS tournaments bounced them out of the running.

Second day attendance was even more scarce, as somewhere less than half of the BYOC seats had actual gamers in them. How do you tell sponsors that they'll have 400 pairs of eyeballs for their products when the event doesn't even reach capacity? Let's add insult to injury when particular sponsors paid exclusive rights to the event!

Questionable event management by Web2Zone. Web2Zone's only prior experience for the gaming industry was handling their only Cyber Center in New York. Samsung America is the parent company for both Web2Zone and The CyberSquare Alliance.

Side note: The IDSA, now called The ESA, had defined gamers into two groups in the late '90s.

1. The Casual Gamer: Those who typically frequent gaming centers/PC Cafe's and composing about 80% of the gamers known and surveyed
2. The HardCore Gamer: Only 20% of the gaming community, yet are responsible for more than 52% of the total revenue in the billion dollar gaming industry. 2004 gaming software sales figures from The ESA point at more than $7.4 billion dollars in revenue.

A fact that should be mentioned to Samsung America about the gamers they are looking to attract. The Cyber Center crowd and the LAN Party crowd are not the same, and unless you've hosted your own LAN parties, you won't be able to identify with this segment of the gaming community. How many Cyber Center gamers build and bring their own PCs on a regular basis? And if they had their own PCs, why would they want to rent one at a Cyber Center?

1. The game server / player stats were a snapshot from GameSpy on 08/01/2005, which won't have been too much different from a few months ago when the tournaments were announced.
2. The speech from the NewEgg spokesperson at the end of LANFest 2K5 thanked all the attendees for coming and buying new hardware from NewEgg when pushing the limit of computer gaming.
3. How much hardware is someone playing CounterStrike 1.6 really planning on buying, particularly for a game mod created in 1999? How much leading edge hardware is a gamer playing Call of Duty planning to buy?
4. CS: Source has a heavier requirement, although not as stiff as BattleField 2. So who's planning on leading edge hardware to play games that are no longer at the forefront?
5. Tournament officials prior to the event claimed that BF2 was too new to be hosted for a tournament, yet even leading LAN parties across the nation are hosting current leading edge games.
6. Headlining CounterStrike, period. 2nd place team members for either CS tournament nearly won more than a 1st place CoD winner! Each CS tournament had nearly 3x the prize outlay over CoD.
7. The BYOC tournaments were an after-thought; BYOC event management seemed lost.
8. Even the Case Mod contest winners received better prizes and recognition than anything non-CS related.
9. When NewEgg was asked if they could post a list of attending gamers, and indicate if they were registered, and pre-paid. The response from NewEgg marketing representatives was there was a privacy policy in place. Yet, this didn't stop ESEA from posting the names, game names, and the teams playing in the tournaments.

CounterStrike is a great game, not my thing, but I would have believed that a cutting edge computer component company would want to push tournaments and events that show off the cutting edge hardware they sell. So has NewEgg lost it's edge by losing sight of the gamers that buy the leading edge hardware to play leading edge games? How many DirectX 7 compatible cards does NewEgg need to sell to keep the lights on?

Overall rating for this LAN event: D+ / C- (80 + 60 + 55)

Honorable Mentions to others at the event

• Canon for having a booth that no one seemed to visit.
• Butt-kicker electronics for having the brightest shirts to give-away and still not listed as an event sponsor.
• Viewsonic for being one of the more well known companies, yet giving away the smallest LCD screen they brought
• NOS for giving away a console game at a PC based event
• Microsoft for having a booth that wasn't in the convention hall, but outside in the heat.
• Rosewill, OCZ, BFG, eVGA, ATI, Gigabyte for all the great prizes.
• ErgoDex, ThermalTake, Linksys, and D Link for having a confusing presence in prizes and donations.
• The gamer that stole the Saitek Eclipse keyboard after it was caught by Androkstasie, GG! It'll come back to haunt you one of these days...
• And lastly, to the NewEgg event staff who were seen bagging spare t-shirts at the end. Oh Noes!