A LAN Party : By The Numbers

I’ve just a great LAN party with my friends.  And while playing games, eating food and mucking about is all well and good, what we really need to perfect the weekend is some data.

Graphs!  We need more graphs!  Luckily, thanks to my Process Time Monitoring script I could record which games we played, when we played them and for how long.

Thursday

We started Thursday afternoon so gaming was pretty light.  I had played Rocket League a few times before so I was eager to get everyone else to have a look.  It was just me and the host for most of the first night so he got Rocket League downloading and in the meantime we kicked it old-school with some Quake 3 duels.

I’d forgotten how much I love duelling;  the speed of Quake 3 while strafe-jumping around the level collecting the power-ups;  making the choice between chasing down that frag or running to get the next armour.  Awesome fun 🙂

Near the end of the evening we had a third player.  Three player games are a bit thin on the ground so we went with Last Stand mode in Dawn of War 2 : Retribution.  Three heroes trying to stay alive as long as possible against waves of enemies.  You get XP and levelling abilities and get to slot different kit in.  Great fun.

Friday

Not much joy getting Unreal Tournament working;  Gamespy?  Really?

Some Diablo 3 while I waited for everyone to get ready 😉

Grey Goo, an old-school RTS by the creators of Command and Conquer was free for the weekend so we gave it a good play through.  Some duels ended badly to begin with, whilst I struggled to figure out the humans.  Then I discovered that quantity had a quality all of it’s own.

Some struggles to get Killing Floor 2 working here (you can see all the restarts) but eventually I got in.  Good fun but again we got slaughtered.

More people converted to Rocket League.  Yay!

Saturday

The mass conversion to the joys of Rocket League continued 🙂  Everyone loved it and as people watched it they bought it so they could join in.  I did employ some nefarious tactics to get everyone to buy it but it was for the greater good, right?

Heroes of the Storm and Quake 3 are staples.  Quake 3 we play Clan Arena and HOTS we play mostly against the AI;  mainly due to terminal suckage.

We had seven players for most of the weekend which made even team games hard.  Rocket League wasn’t too much of a problem (as the bot played as well as we did) but some of the other games were trickier.

We’d occasionally split into one four player and one three player game.  DungeonLand was good for that;  I’d play the DM and three heroes would come into my dungeon and break everything.

HOTS to finish again!

Sunday

Heroes of the Storm, followed by a marathon session in Starcraft 2.  We rarely play the base game (instead playing in the Arcade) so this was a few games of Star Battles.  MOBA with space-ships 🙂

We finish early on Sunday so we fell back on the favourites;  Quake 3 and Rocket League.

Great fun!

Overall

Hardly very surprisingly Rocket League was the big winner with over 6.5 hours played over the whole weekend.  Quake 3 was pretty close though with Heroes of the Storm a distant third.

Not too much Left For Dead this time which was unusual;  a combination of a fun new game and odd numbers nobbled it I think.