Well after much head scratching, negotiating and spreadsheeting we’ve got 3 events booked with the venue for 2015:
All of these run from 6pm on the Friday to 6pm on Sunday – 48 hours of LAN!
Stick the dates in your calendars, or subscribe to ours so you don’t miss out.
We’ve been hounded with questions about what it’s all about. Fear not inquisitive gamers, because we’ve compiled an in-exhaustive FAQ to address the dozens of questions we receive daily on the subject:
A weekend filled with indulgent amounts of gaming, eating, drinking and music, intermingled with sleep. Guests bring along their gaming rig, plug into our superfast network and play.
Everyone who buys a ticket gets to vote on which games get dedicated play time, so it really is up to you! We also set aside time for “projector games”. Keep an ear out for announcements on Facebook and Twitter closer to the event.
In between the videos and music submitted by everyone at the event that get played on the projector and soundsystem, everyone’s invited to play split screen / co-op multiplayer games on the projector. The record last time was simultaneous 10-player Gang Beasts – completely ridiculous!
Not only can you pop to the longest bar in Lewes next door, but now (due to popular demand) you may bring your own drinks to the LAN. We’ll also be selling snacks and energy drinks throughout the event, and running a pizza order with Dominos on the Saturday night.
What was good: Everything. What was bad: It ended and we had to go back to real life.
Chuck Noland
8/8 gr8 LAN m8
Joosebug
Great LAN. I wouldn’t have travelled 300 miles if I didn’t think it would be.
Hunter
That’s right, Zero Ping Heroes LAN 11 is officially on its way – and it’s gonna be a good one!
As well as free-for-alls throughout the LAN, we’ll also be running the projector again for some big-screen games. Add to this game servers running top titles like Natural Selection 2 and Company of Heroes as well as favourites such as Team Fortress 2 and Counter Strike: Global Offensive, you’re guaranteed a wide selection of games from the minute you get here.
We’ll be at St. Mary’s Social Centre again, so if you do feel the need for a break, a nice drink and a game of pool will be waiting for you in the St Mary’s Supporters Club Bar.
Of course, it wouldn’t be a ZPH LAN without the standards you’ve come to expect from us. You’ll enjoy 60mbps down, 20mbps up internet throughout the event; access to the LANager, which allows you to choose videos for playing on the big screen,carefully optimised lighting and cooling; a tuck shop packed full of sweets, snacks and energy drinks, and – as always – a nice big pizza order on Saturday night. Most importantly, you’ll enjoy two days of social gaming surrounded by new friends and teammates.
It’s only a little over 3 weeks until we open the doors for our 10th LAN party, and with only 13 tickets left book now to secure your seat!
We’ve got lots planned to make it a great weekend for everyone involved – projector games, tournaments, event-wide achievements, big games and much more – a feast for the senses. Stay tuned for further info.
We know the biggest contributers to a great LAN are you guys, the attendees, so with every ticket sold you get to put forward your favourite games and anyawesome ideas you have for fun stuff at the event. We’ll run feedback afterwards too, but how about suggestions before the event starts…? We’re all about innovation here at ZPH.
We’ve got to let you know we’re decking out the hall* with a 10 foot projector screen,600 Watts** of soundsystem, pretty lights, a gigabit network and a fibre Internet connection.
Did we say you can choose the music and videos? Because you can.
Sound like fun? Get your tickets here!
Not sure yet? Check out our videos and photos from past events.
Feel free to get in touch with us if you have any questions or suggestions – we’d love to hear from you.
For you techies out there we’d like to share the how and why of our LAN’s network. Unlike many other LAN party organisers our network design is not lead by convenience or economy – instead we’re dedicated to delivering maximum throughput to all attendees regardless of location.
We achieve this by giving each and every attendee a network cable, directly connected to our gigabit core switch. While this increases the total length of cable, and therefore cabling cost, it means that everyone can connect at full gigabit speeds and communicate with any other attendee PC or server at these gigabit speeds, all at the same time!
In short we eliminate network bottlenecks.
Here’s a simplified diagram to illustrate our network design:
This method of cabling is what’s deployed to office buildings and is known as structured cabling. We firmly believe that if it’s good enough for an office, then LAN parties deserve better!
We use 48 port Netgear GS748TS switches which have 96Gbps of internal switching bandwidth, also know as switching fabric. This magic number is 48 ports × 2 gigabits (1gbps in each direction). Currently we have all attendees and servers connected to a single switch, but as we expand beyond 48 ports we plan to use link aggregation to combine the bandwidth of 8 ports on each switch to give us a 16 gigabit link between the switches. What this means in practical terms is that it would take 16 people all transferring data at gigabit speeds, 8 on one switch and 8 on the other to start bottlenecking.
Diagram of our future network design:
Lets contrast with the typical alternative network design employed by other LAN parties – edge switches uplinking to core switches. In this configuration, attendees connect to a small inexpensive “edge” switches local to their block of tables, which are in turn connected – “uplinked” via a single or a handful of link aggregated ports to a larger “core” switch, usually in the server rack.
The keen eyed amoung you will be able to see the inherant bottlenecks in this configuration, which mean that if 2 (or more) attendees connected to the 1st edge switch want to communicate with 2 (or more) attendees on the other edge switch they will all have to share the 1 gigabit uplink between the switches, and compete with all other attendees on their respective blocks for bandwidth on that uplink. No good at all!
Some organisers combat the possibility of the uplink being saturated by using 100 megabit edge switches with a gigabit uplink port, meaning that 10 attendees would have to be saturating their connections before the uplink is saturated, but 100 megabit LANs are slo-o-ow. At least with gigabit everyone connected to the same edge switch can talk to eachother at the same time at full speed with no problem.
Don’t get me wrong, this design is perfectly valid and will work just fine for low bandwidth activities such as playing games and browsing the web, but as soon as attendees start downloading files from the organisers and eachother, the network uplink will become saturated and cause lag in games – not ideal!
So to wrap up, we’re very proud of our bottleneck-free gigabit network and would like to invite everyone to experience it first hand at our next event this May!
It’s taken a while, but we’ve finally secured a worthy venue for Zero Ping Heroes LAN 10! Woohoo!
St Mary’s Social Centre is located in the west side of Lewes. Awkward rap references aside, it’s a 19-minute car ride from Brighton, or a 4-minute taxi ride from Lewes train station. Check out the inside of the hall here.
The hall is joined with the St Mary’s Supporter’s Club Bar, who have welcomed us to pop in for drinks and pool. Being a private club bar rather than a public… pub…, they have some of the cheapest drinks in Lewes, not to mention the longest bar in town!
As with our past events we’re being brave and allowing anyone to submit YouTube videos and music to the collaborative video playlist. We’ll also be using our projector for playing splitscreen games on our 12-foot screen.
Aside from all these great added extras, we’re still dedicated to the core of what we believe makes LAN parties great – social PC gaming with a great atmosphere, made by you.
Sound like fun? Get your tickets here!
Not sure yet? Check out our videos and photos from past events.
Feel free to get in touch with us if you have any questions or suggestions – we’d love to hear from you!
We know it’s been a while now since LAN 9, and we’re just as eager as you are for LAN 10. Now that we’ve outgrown Phoenix House we’re in talks with bigger and better venues in the Lewes & Brighton area. Hang in there!
In the meantime, feel free to join our weekly online games night on Thursday evenings – all you need to do is download Mumble and join our server. If you’re really hungry for LAN action there are still some seats left for the BIG GAME 36 in Southampton, where 10+ of us will be getting our fix.
If you haven’t been to a Zero Ping Heroes LAN yet, or you need something to keep you going until LAN 10, check out our past event videos and photos.
Until then, happy fragging!
Attention all chatty gamers!
Sadly the frequent DDoS attacks to Multiplay‘s (otherwise excellent) UK Mumble server has meant we’ve been forced to move our Mumble server away to a DigitalOcean server in London. I’ve updated our site’s channel viewer and server history to point at the new server, so you can use those as normal from now on.
Click here to connect to the new server!
New Server
Address: mumble.zeropingheroes.co.uk
Port: 64738