The future of Escape

[n0el]

I think that’s a major issue for most LAN style settings. They are almost always part of a larger event. The only small studio style setups are things like Take, but even that struggles and has been kept afloat by Blizzard and massive community donations >20000USD, per event.

[Riotcoke]

The only problem with the location of my lan in my mind was that it was outside of Manchester, so it made going out etc quite hard. Overall though it was close to an airport and for the UK was relatively easy to get to. Crashing someone else's lan and making players pay to get there i don't think will work though, firstly some players won't pay to go to a lan, e.g rouga, and will be very expensive if ESOC pays for it. Also you would have to not include NA players if you were to pay for transit, as i highly doubt esoc will be able to pay the thousands of pounds for flights for players like Mitoe

[[Armag] diarouga]

What country has the largest top level player base? I could pretty easily host a LAN in NA, but I would not want to take on the travel costs and such.

France or Germany

[scarm]

Yeah somewhere in the France/Germany/Netherlands/Belgium border area like cologne or something would probably the place with the shortest transport ways for most of the top players and also large parts of the community.

[Lukas_L99]

ESL One Cologne with AoE3 confirmed

[HeadKilla]

ok. @Diarouga can host then =)

[RefluxSemantic]

For a LAN you need a decent sized place though and you probably need to be able to supply computers and stuff (unless somehow everybody here plays on laptops). That's somewhat expensive.

[Dolan]

Tbh, I'm starting to doubt the usefulness of AOE3 LAN events, considering that despite being played on high-end equipment in a zero latency networking setup, games still experienced lag. It defeats the purpose of having a LAN event if even under ideal conditions AOE3 can still lag.

Might as well use the money from the prize pool to reward the best players, so that they can just buy better computers and get better internet. The overall effect might be comparable to having a LAN event, except without all the logistics and accommodation expenses.

Sure, LAN events are much more than that, but ultimately it all boils down to being able to have high-level games in a lag-free environment. If that can't be secured, then it all seems like a pretext for a meetup.

[n0el]

The largest playerbase and the largest user base is the US. I saw some statistics on it from somewhere, but i don't think it was particularly close. I would be cuiorus to see EU as a whole vs NA though.

[Riotcoke]

The players that actually watch/play high level content are in the EU though. It doesn't matter if there's a load of players in the US who are pr13 and don't care for the competitive scene at all.

[Mitoe]

Tbh, I'm starting to doubt the usefulness of AOE3 LAN events, considering that despite being played on high-end equipment in a zero latency networking setup, games still experienced lag. It defeats the purpose of having a LAN event if even under ideal conditions AOE3 can still lag.

Might as well use the money from the prize pool to reward the best players, so that they can just buy better computers and get better internet. The overall effect might be comparable to having a LAN event, except without all the logistics and accommodation expenses.

Sure, LAN events are much more than that, but ultimately it all boils down to being able to have high-level games in a lag-free environment. If that can't be secured, then it all seems like a pretext for a meetup.

It was a way better experience playing in LAN—there was far far less lag. It did happen occasionally, but to be honest it was usually only in the first 30 seconds of the game, and if it happened after that I think it was more frequent in Kaiser’s games where his laptop wasn’t nearly as strong as the other computers at the LAN.

The quality of the games at the LAN went up drastically from tournaments played online, and that was almost entirely due to the low latency environment.


Whether or not it’s worth it though is another matter and depends on the situation/money/players/location/etc.

[fightinfrenchman]

Lancaster, PA would be an ideal location for a future LAN tourney.

[Dolan]

@Mitoe That might be your perception because you're playing from NA and most high level players are in Europe. So for you the LAN probably was a major improvement. I'm curious if players in Europe have noticed a similar extent of decreased lag.

[Amsel_]

How much does it cost to rent a studio for a day/week in Europe?

[kami_ryu]

How much does it cost to rent a studio for a day/week in Europe?

Probably not all that much...

Easyjet flights and train tickets in Europe shouldn't be too expensive to get either. USA to Europe though should probably cost a $1000 / person or something.

Hosting a euro LAN, even for ESOC, shouldn't be too unrealistic. though it would be pricey for our standards, I guess? hmm.

[Mitoe]

@Mitoe That might be your perception because you're playing from NA and most high level players are in Europe. So for you the LAN probably was a major improvement. I'm curious if players in Europe have noticed a similar extent of decreased lag.

That's a fair point, and it was definitely a much larger improvement for me than for them, but I know from talking to them it was still a significant difference.