Flatcon - The Aftermath

A Flatcon after action report

Well, Flatcon is done and over with, sadly, but plenty of fond memories will hold me till next year. As those reading this know, U.H.A.C.C. donated our time and machines to bring the first ever LAN-party to this year's Flatcon. To say the least, it was a staggering and whole-hearted success!

We started out strong, with five volunteers bringing in the original machines, hooking them up and plugging them in. A special thanks during the setup for our IWU liaison, our good friend and fellow member, Kit. Kit works at IWU and loaned us a cart, a fan, other hardware. He and another fellow member that works at IWU, Joe, made sure the ports in the room were ready for us to plug in and go.

So Mike, Kevin, Jessica, Dustin, and myself setup and cabled the room. I brought my laptop, which I setup to use the projector in the room for a real big monitor. That projector really made teaching a game to a newbie much simpler. From there, it was a simple matter of turning on the boxes and making up a schedule. So we printed out some signs and sign-up sheets to play some Diablo 2, Dungeon Siege, Never Winter Nights, and Warcraft 2. Not surprisingly, Dungeon Siege and Warcraft 2 were huge hits, although disappointingly Never Winter Nights was a pretty nasty flop. It is just simply a difficult game to teach people how to play on the spot.

So lesson learned, we went into Saturday planning on adding Starcraft to the mix, which went very well, along with Warcraft 2, Diablo 2, and Dungeon Siege. All the games went real well, filling up the seats and everyone having a wonderful time. Saturday night was the big Warcraft 2 tournament, which went well past the allocated time, rotating people into seats as the previous owners died horrible deaths at the hands of former friends and allies.

We planned to finish out the last day, Sunday, with the two strongest games, Warcraft 2 and Dungeon Siege. But I made a command decision to give Never Winter Nights another shot. Never Winter Nights went much better this time, as I asked that only experienced players join the game this time, but it was still an unwieldy game for a large LAN. It's just very difficult to get an entire party working together in that game. It has the potential for being the best game, as long as the entire group has played the game a lot. Still, it was a lot of fun, even though we all died a lot. In retrospect, Never Winter is best played with either a large group of extremely experienced players, with a well-planned party, or in several small groups.

Very few problems came up, as everyone involved chipped in and helped out with all the games. We had a wonderful time working the Con this year, and everyone made mention of looking forward to next year.

Other UHACCers showed up for the festivities also, people like Eric, Opie, Elliot, and of course our illustrious president, Chuck, who worked nearly the whole day on our new webpage and forum templates. Chuck then lent his strong back to the task of tearing down.

The Flatcon staff couldn't have been more helpful if they tried - they checked on us at every moment they had spare, offered every bit of help they could, and were very impressed at the job we did. David Ross made a point of welcoming us back for next year's Flatcon, which I certainly plan to attend.

For next year, my goal is to have at least 16 playable machines, so we can always be running two events at the same time. I'd like to bring in some first-person shooters, and create tournaments complete with prizes for the winners of the first person and the war games. I certainly want to add more war games to next year's LAN-party, such as Age of Empires.

And most of all for next year, I want to bring in more Linux. We didn't get around to running an install fest, but that should really be worked in next year. I was pleasantly surprised at the number of people that were familiar with Linux, and very surprised at the number of people that understood just what it meant to be dual-booting a system.

To sum up this whole write-up in a single phrase - WE'LL BE BACK!

Ok then, here's the pics!

Upcoming Events

UHACC Pre-Meeting

Wednesday Evenings, ~5:15-6:30pm

- Lunker's

UHACC Meeting

Every Wednesday - 7:00-9:00pm

IWU Center for Natural Science Learning and Research, Fishbowl, floor 2. [Directions]