I noticed that my LAN game monitor was not finding any games. Didn't think much of it. Later I notice a person behind me playing Dungeon Siege. I try to join. It can't locate his game. After working with the hoster of the game with no luck, I check with tech support and low and behold, game broadcasting is blocked. They say it's because that much broadcasting clogs up the network and would crash it. Well...get some better equipment. Check with your sponsors.

By blocking this feature, it is harming the peoples' gaming ability and options at this LAN gaming event. You can't see what other games are being hosted and screaming out across the room "HEY! I'M ABOUT TO HOST A SERIOUS SAM CO-OP SERVER AT IP 172.19.x.x IF ANYONE IS INTERESTED!" would not be welcomed. We are left with having to walk up and down the isles looking for a game we play and when we locate one, ask who is hosting it and what the hoster's IP address IP. Then head back to your system and hope you don't forget the IP address. There are a few games that do not support a direct IP entry, so the only way you can play with others is if you are on the same subnet.

So in the end, yes better equipment would cost more, but thats what sponsors are for. Being able to see what games are being played is a fundamental feature for a LAN party of this size. This must be fixed.

Ya i was kinda flabbergasted when I learned this as well. It's not really a lan with the way it is now.

The following games' multiplayer feature will not function due to this mistake. (unless you're on the same subnet) I will update this as I find more
Titan Quest series
Dungeon Siege series.

So stuff that 12 people are playing.

It's not that we blocked Game broadcasting, but that the network isn't setup for that. Each table has it's own subnet so that if something happens at a table it will take down the table instead of the event. There haven't been any major network outages(Knock on wood), so I'd say it's going well.

-Mitch

The Lan is dead. Long live the Lan. The internet swallowed Quakecon BYOC. It is awesome, I was able to play with my clan brothers here and across the country at our normal time. thank you NOC and ATT.

ok so im not at quakecon this year but let me get this straight. If someone sets up a server no one else can see it? What is the point of a lan then. Hopefully you have this fixed next year or I may not bother coming.

For real, I speedtested it, 30 down, 30 up 5ms to speedtest.net nearest server.

I agree completely with the OP. It didn't feel like a LAN at all and this was the first year I wished I'd saved myself the trouble of bringing my computer at all. Every other Quakecon ever didn't need to do this and I don't know why it's needed now. I'd prefer to not have internet at all and feel like I'm actually connected to the other couple thousand people in the room with me.

What game did you have trouble with?
I think Steam servers started working Saturday correctly.
It could be seen from the internet. so If you made a server called Happy fraggers at Quakecon, then people used the internet in the normal way to find servers, I think it just worked.
I think the other thing someone need to do next year if it works the same is promote a QCon steam or Xfire or whatever group. I would address your issue maybe.

Yes we should turn off the Internet so nothing on Steam works since that is so much better. Also we should not have IRC where people can post where games are going on and we should have at a minimum 2600 different games being played...

No matter what you do and no matter how hard you try someone is going to complain...

I never had a network issue. Played games whenever I wanted. Logged into work across remote desktop on VPN and laughed at problems people were having at work while I was gone. I would give the network and connectivity a 10. Yay us!

The games could be seen fine from the internet. That's not the problem. The problem is that other people actually AT Quakecon couldn't see the games. People tried to maintain a server list on an internal server but of course most of them were out of date because people would close their servers because they were empty because only like 4 people in the entire BYOC knew about the server lists AND knew how to use the IPs in their specific game (for example in TF2 you can't connect to a LAN server from the server browser, you have to type "connect x.x.x.x" in the console). A quakecon steam or xfire would have the same issue, not enough people would know about it. Anything OTHER than server IP broadcasting is going to result in fewer players than there would be otherwise.

Last year I could bring up a list of well over 20 TF2 games being played on LAN. This year I knew of exactly 1.

It would be good if a tool like All seeing Eye was still around. that is what one used to use to deal with this issue.
I think work would get around faster than you think.
"Hey Bro TF2 cool, are you on the lan?"
"Hell's Yes join the quakecon steam group."
Or a big sign by the door.

But I feel your pain. I know my buddies had some heartache that no one was playing on the servers they hosted, then figured out that only a small number of people could see them.

fast internet was definitely a must have this year and years to come. With so many game publishers requiring constant online connections to play or log into their gaming platform, like Steam and Battle.net) Many other publishers are following the same idea by joining Steam or creating their own platforms which rely on a specialized communication protocol developed by the company. Of course these services assume you have broadband (which we have not realistically had previous years. However not all publishers have joined that band wagon. THQ, Gas Powered Games, Monolith and other. Some publishers have joined in, but only with their newer games. Thus the older ones like Age of Empires series, Rise of Nations, Empire Earth, Serious Sam's, need I go on, get left in the dust

I agree the internet being much faster really was a big convenience. I was floored by how fast I downloaded Brink for the free weekend. I was probably just speaking out of frustration when I was saying there shouldn't be internet at all. If we would've gotten our server IPs broadcast there would be nothing but good things to say about this year's BYOC, and if it's fixed for 2012 that might be the best Quakecon yet.

That's because there was a local steam cache server. As for fixing broadcasting dedicated servers, there were several server lists up on twitter, reddit, and a local Source game server list as well. The issue seemed to be getting information out.

All in all, best BYOC ever.

Getting server broadcasting working again is absolutely high up on the network staff's list for next year. Not promising it will happen but it's being looked at very closely.