Alright, alright, so it’s not as catchy looking as “100 days” till CryoLAN: Red Oktober, but we’ve got news you need to hear.

LAST MINUTE UPDATE:  We’ve got a special offer for the first 10 standard (non-VIP) pre-pay attendees to CryoLAN who register for the event prior to Midnight on the 7/24/2010.  The first ten people to pre-pay within that time period can use the promo code: COMR4ADE to recieve $5 off their pre-paid admission!

Quick, easy setup

The first bit of news isn’t really news at all for anyone who attended CryoLAN Beta. We’ve got a great event coming up, and a lot of what makes CryoLAN great is the staff and the work we put into making our event easy to attend. We believe that when a person arrives at our LAN party they should be able to set up and go immediately. Basically, you shouldn’t have to jump through hoops or figure things out on your own. Our staff makes this possible with a lot of work prior to and during the event.

When you arrive at CryoLAN, all you do is either pay at the front desk or confirm your pre-payment. We’ll give you a wristband as proof of payment, and let you go set up. Each table will be set up for two people, so you won’t have to squeeze in or make room. These are 30″ by 8′ tables, so you’ve got plenty of room to accommodate yourself and the person next to you. Your Ethernet cable will also be right there waiting for you, and each set of two tables has it’s own power strip. Four computers per circuit means rock solid power stability throughout the event. Then, once you’re all hooked up, our server is running DHCP, which means no registration and no hassle in order to get online. You can also easily hook up a console to the network as well without having to get us a MAC address. The network itself is configured to minimize your wait times. Our full-gigabit network, with redundant connections between core and table switches, provides you with super fast, low latency connections for gaming and file transfers. Cat6 cabling throughout also ensures optimal connections. We’ll even have a Wi-Fi connection available this year for people who need it.

Eventbrite Registration

Registration this year is even easier, as we’ve decided to make use of Eventbrite to handle all of our event registration needs. Just go to the registration page and sign up for the event when you are ready to pay. Eventbrite makes our registration process quick and easy this year, and increases your options for paying for the event. Pre-paying for CryoLAN Red Oktober is a great way to secure a seat for the event, which you’ll quite likely want to do. We’re increasing our seating this year by twenty-five spots, but expect the event to fill quickly.

Group Incentive

One of the great things we did at CryoLAN Beta was to give people a discount on their entry fee if they registered five or more people. We had four groups take advantage of this discount last year, GPA, GLAN, NCS and LANMinds. The application of the discount was a bit tricky, however, and made people jump through hoops in order to take advantage of it. This year, we’re making a new group incentive that is even easier to take advantage of. We’re doing a “Buy 5, Get 1 Free” special. Any gaming group that registers at least a multiple of five gamers by the end of September will get one FREE entry into CryoLAN Red Oktober, to be given out as they see fit. See this thread for more details and to let us know how many people are in your group! Remember, this offer is good only through September, and also only while seats remain available.

VIP

Another great feature we have for those who wish to take advantage of it is our VIP program. Found on the registration page just below the options for a regular sign-up, VIP costs $50, and we do our best to make sure you get your money’s worth. Your VIP entry fee entitles you to a special VIP t-shirt, priority access to food, early entry for yourself and up to two friends, and more benefits that will be announced as the event draws near. This year we have just twenty VIP slots, and as we announce more VIP benefits we expect them to sell out quickly.

Tournaments

We are planning on having both traditional tournaments at CryoLAN Red Oktober, as well as a return of the Meta tournament.

We’re likely to host four traditional tournaments at Red Oktober, and the games for two of these tournaments have already been determined. Our Saturday afternoon tournament is going to be a console fighter game, a first for CryoLAN! We’ll be hosting a Super Street Fighter 4 tournament, the details of which are located here. We will also be hosting some form of Starcraft 2 tournament, more details pending.

With regards to the Meta tournament, the issues that troubled our attempt at running this at CryoLAN Beta have been addressed. We’ll be giving this another shot, opening it up to more participants and making it more enjoyable as a whole. The Kid has more information on his plans here.

Sponsors and prizes

Before wrapping everything up, I need to mention some of the great sponsors we’ve got this year. We’ve picked up sponsorships from Warmouse, Peregrine, and Gigabyte already! We’re working hard to acquire more sponsors on a daily basis, and expect many more companies to sign on with us as the LAN party draws closer!

That pretty much covers everything for this update, but stay tuned for more information. The staff of CryoLAN will be making appearances at local LAN parties thought Western New York up until Red Oktober, and we’ll be making more announcements on our site, our Twitter and Facebook pages, and through blast e-mails. If you’re not already on our mailing list and want to sign up on it, just add yourself on the lower right hand corner of the CryoLAN main page.

From the desk of The Kid:

Greetings, gamers. Listen up, for I have heard your complaints and addressed them in Meta Tournament 1.0. While Meta Beta decried separation between the haves and have-nots of gamers, those with the latest and greatest and those still LANning with a laptop, I failed. It was too closed off, in creating my Tournament I failed to anticipate that people wouldn’t want to play every game, and thus there was a gap between those who got in and wanted to play, and those who didn’t but yearned to take part. For that I apologize, with a retooled system for Meta 1.0.

This coming Red Oktober, there will be open play tournaments once every few hours, free for anyone to join and to gain points in. Anyone who plays in a game will receive 1 point, first second and third receiving 5, 4, and 3 respectively. This allows you (the gamers) to drop in and out at your pleasure, while at the same time addressing the concern last year about how few open play tournaments there were. Don’t want to participate in the Meta at all? Fret not, you can still win prizes; we will have smaller prizes for each mini tournament, as well, of course, as a premium prize for the Meta Champion (and by premium I mean nearly $200 dollars of delicious peripheral).

True to the original aims of the Meta, there will be no points awarded to the winners or participants of any tournament that would require you to buy a game, and all games should run acceptably on nearly any hardware. Even those of you that only come for the ambiance with your mom’s dell will still have a chance to win something!

I hope I’ve addressed the bulk of questions and have seeded some interest in this year’s festivities, and any questions can be addressed to me on the forums, at viewtopic.php?f=6&t=143

This is a reminder to everyone out there that JonnyFunFun’s second LAN 69 event takes place this coming weekend!  CryoLAN is happy to provide the network for Jonny’s LAN, so you can expect to have the same great full-gigabit network at Jonny’s LAN that helped make CryoLAN a success.  He’s got more sponsors, more prizes, and more degrees farenheit (screw Celcius, we’re Uhmuhrikan) this time around, and it’s going to be a great weekend for a LAN party.  The event runs Friday through Sunday, and it’s not too late to register.  Only $20.  Go do it!  NOW!

In other news, I’m excited to announce that we’ve picked up yet  another addition to our already awesome set of CryoLAN switches.  We just acquired an SMC Networks Tigerswitch 8748L2.  Our other switches are also SMC Tigerswitches, so we’re able to add this new piece of hardware with total confidence.  It is another full-gigabit, 48-port switch with management featurs, just like our current core switch.  In fact, this switch is a minor improvement upon our existing model 8648!

This gives us more than enough hardware to support both our jump up to 10o people for CryoLAN:Red Oktober, but also will allow us to build upwards from there as CryoLAN continues to grow!

That’s right, we weren’t dead, just resting.  As you can see, we’ve got a totally new look for the CryoLAN website.  You may also notice our new artwork at the top of the page, including the new character on the right.  Our very own Death2Moogles has been doing a great job of producing original work for us, and we’ve got her working on some other projects too.

Some of you might be wondering what the “Red Oktober” thing is all about too.  That, I’m proud to announce, is the name of the second CryoLAN event.  CryoLAN : Red Oktober, or C:RO for short, will be taking place on October 29th – 31st, 2010, at the South Lockport Volunteer Firehall, the same venue as CryoLAN Beta.  We’ll have the same great network as we had for CryoLAN Beta, the same rock-solid power support, a better seating layout that accomodates a larger number of attendees.

This event is going to be a small step upwards from CryoLAN Beta for the CLP staff.  We’ve brought a new face on board, and are already working on improvements to the event as a whole.  For those who attended our first event, you can expect better tournaments, with a less disruptive Meta tournament. 

We’re hoping for improved prizes at Red Oktober, since we were able to do great things with what we got in our first event.  Of course, since Michael ”Izumo13″ Miller is running the show, you can also expect the unexpected yet again.  The first event saw a huge cake cut with a katana, flying mice, PC demolitions, chainmail, Nerf chainguns, and a full set of melee weapons.  What will take place at CryoLAN Red Oktober?  You’ll have to be there to find out!

More details coming soon, including full pricing details, our new group incentive, and of course, our popular VIP package.

Also, some of you might have questions regarding registration for CryoLAN.  With the migration to the new site we’ve decided to have people sign up for the new site rather than retain the old user list.  This is a slight inconvenience, but we’d like to be sure that we’re sending e-mails only to real people.  Some users had signed up twice on the old site, and we’d really like to keep the new user list pruned and accurate.  The forums are still the same as they were before, though that may change eventually as well.  Right now you’ll still need to log in to the forums seperately from your site login.  We’re working hard on a way to unify the login between the site and the forums, and will do our best to make that as non-disruptive as possible as well.

Welcome to the New and Improved CryoLAN Party Website.  We have spent a lot of time on this, and a face lift for the forums, and hope that you all appreciate the hard work our team has put into getting this new site up and running for all of you.

Take a look around as there are some new areas here that will allow us to get you more info about up coming events and other LAN’s in the area, as well as a redesigned Registration and Payment system to allow for a better integration to the site.

Let us know in the comments what you think, and if there is anything else that you might like to see on the new site that you think would be beneficial to your LANing experience.

As the CryoLAN staff moves into the planning stages for our next event, we’ve encountered a novel little problem. Since we’re going to be doing more events, we can’t call them all CryoLAN now can we? So, the first problem that crops up is “What do we call the first event to avoid confusion?”

Of course, those with VIP t-shirts have a nifty little “Year One” reminder on them. “Year One” lacks a bit in the character department, and it also isn’t going to be sufficient. After all, if we’re going to be doing two events annually, “Year One” could mean either of the two events, couldn’t it?

Therefore, for simplicity’s sake, the Staff has decided to refer to our first event as “CryoLAN Beta”. It seems appropriate, since we had a solid event with most of the elements we wanted in place, but we’ve got a lot of fine-tuning to do in order to be the best LAN around. So, we call it a “Beta” and we move forward from there.

Now, once we decide that, we’ve got the present to worry about. We’re already planning event number two, but “Number Two” just has all sorts of bad connotations (not to mention more than a few bad jokes) attached to it. So, for our second event we’ve decided to base the name around a theme. It will still be CryoLAN, of course, but we’re wanting an awesome sounding name. There’s a few we kicked around, such as “CryoLAN: Meltdown” or “CryoLAN: Camo Edition” or “CryoLAN: Sucks Less Than Some of the Other LANs”. In the end, we tossed out those names (though you could see one of them again in the future!) and have a solid theme that we’re working on.

We’ll be revealing more details once the artwork is done. Death2Moogles is on contract again for the art for CryoLAN and she’s already done some amazing work for what we’re planning next! Also known as the PC destroying Panda, we’re excited to be working with her again. In case you didn’t see, check out the forums HERE for a slideshow that demonstrates just how dangerous she can be to a computer case when enraged!

And, lastly, since we’re already thinking about the far future, I can tell you that we’re already looking into the details for CryoLAN 2011. Not too much is known about next year’s event yet, but I can tell you this. We plan on seating the most people at a LAN party in Buffalo in the last six years. We’re already shopping for a venue, since we know that planning an event of that scale takes a lot of work and lead time. Of course, we won’t be cutting back on the quality just to fit more people in the door. Our goal is to provide a rock-solid network, stable power, good organization and execution at each of our events.