I actually just got back from a Lan tournament we held in our school's Lab today, and we've done this twice before as well. The last two we had 18, and t his time we had 28. I'm not particularly good at giving detailed instructions but here are some things to think about.
IF you play an easy to play game you can get even non-gamers to come and play. It will seriously make a huge difference. We've been playing Unreal Tournament 2004 for all three and so far we have not gotten a single complaint about the game being too hard. And at each we've had at least 5 people who had never played a computer game before, beyond solitaire.
Also, because we've played Unreal Tournament 2004 we could simply run the game on all of the school's computer because you can practically run the game on a calculator... ok hyperbole but that's all right.
We had 28 kids playing, and each payed 20 dollars, but got 5 dollars off if they invited someone, so I believe the most anyone had off was 10 dollars. We then bought a bunch of two liter bottles of pop(I think easily two dozen two liters.) along with some pizza from Little Caesar's. We then bought some fun little prizes for most kills or loudest player from the dollar store. After all was said and done we were 306$ richer , and we had similar cash draws for previous tournaments.
We probably spent about three days of work ni the Labs making sure they could run the games and figuring out the best way to set up servers and such. So if you figure that it took 5 people 3 days to set it up and you brought in 306 dollars in about 5 hours, that really isn't bad at all.
So since I know that might be hard to read I'll try to summarize in a few points.
- Run a simple game and use school computers to do it to get more people to come.
- Play an easier game, such as UT 2004, to get many non-gamers to play.
- Set it up FIRST style with qualification matches, then team pickings, and then a standard ladder.
- Make sure you have at least one person who knows the insides and outsides of the particular game, and maybe someone who has had experience running a gaming server before.
- Give out prizes to the winners, but also to other people such as the best sniper, the most improved player, or even the worst player. People like being rewarded and are more inclined to return.
I hope that helps.
David Resowski
Team 910