Yet again it is nearly time for MAGFest, and yet again it is time to cover the tournaments and events for the LAN room. I am still the Director of LAN Tournaments, and let’s get started.

Unfortunately there are fewer public play PCs, so as a reminder of LAN policy on the subject, we do not reserve public PCs for tournament use; it is your responsibility to obtain and hold a computer to use. It is recommended that you bring your own system if you can rather than relying on public play. The public play PCs are still the high-quality machines from Computer Upgrade King[www.cukusa.com], so the ones we do have will perform well. LAN has undergone a bit of a shuffling of layout, moving the Theatre and stage front and centre, a move that should increase the traffic to the Theatre. The help desk is more centrally located in the room, and space has formally been allocated there for tournament help and signup, so things should be less cramped. We will have the room audio this year, so instead of the horrid megaphone, we can now broadcast the glorious teachings important announcements to everyone at once. We are also going to ramp up the Discord usage this year as well. The tournament roster has been trimmed down a little bit, but we’re trying something a little different with community-run events, to be covered later.

On the rules front, we’ve rewritten the rules, clarifying some bits, cleaning up unneeded text (which sadly also means they’re less friendly), and putting the general rules in all the tournament-specific rules. Most of it is still fairly obvious stuff and format information. The main reason for the change is that most players only play in one or two tournaments, where the previous split format was written under the assumption that the bulk of players will participate in many tournaments. The internal schedule with all the colours is back again, linking all the rules in the appropriate boxes. The schedule can be found here.[docs.google.com] For the Guidebook users, we’ve tried something new with how tournaments are shown. All tournaments are on one column with only 30min durations, as the estimates are estimates and the start is what is important. The Theatre has its own column, as do other events.

Speaking of events, we’re introducing a couple of longer events to try things out. Jackbox returns, yet again on Thursday. Also starting on Thursday we’ll be hosting a Factorio server, starting around 5pm, or whenever I get it working. There will be mods, but the full extent of how modded hasn’t been determined yet. OpenTTD is also returning, for those who like trains, starting on Friday around 1pm and running through the day. Saturday we have a game of Stellaris planned. Why Stellaris? Because I like it. So yes, the events are basically “stuff LAN Staff want to play multiplayer of.” Want to do something else? Why not use this years’ experiment and submit a Head-to-Head event[google.com]?

Head-to-Head is something we’re introducing this year to provide a structure to more informal events and tournaments. We’ve gotten the sense over the past few years that there’s an impression that LAN Events is this unyielding group that doesn’t take any suggestions. Which is not the case. Due to how things line up in event prep and where certain deadlines are, a lot of things just come in too late to be helpful. To help reduce these issues, we’re adding Head-to-Head, a framework for attendees to run small events and have some room announcement and MPoint support. While the guidelines appear harsh, most of the information requested is so that we can collect accurate data on Head-to-Head events and adequately announce it to the room.