NOTE: This was written in January but was never posted.

A few weekends ago I was in Toronto attending the prestigious and premier CS2 event LaundersLAN. All things considered, I have grown very fond of the venue it is hosted in alongside the computers that are used at the event. We went to LaundersLAN 1.5 and they apparently are fragadelphia/NSG computers that are moved over. Really I had no issues with client side hardware.

For those not in the know about the current state of NA CS, it’s really on life support. It seems that the only events that pull people out to play on LAN are these huge sponsored events where you need either legitimate pros playing (very cool to sit basically across from nitr0 while Moses is behind him and NRG, spectating). This event certainly did not help the situation.

Zooper 1v1s nitr0 any day of the week and wins.

The main terrible thing about LaundersLAN 2 has now been essentially reported on practically every major news site, like dust2.us and Reddit and has more than made the rounds on Twitter. Due to the venue insisting that their power and networking must be used, a severe issue with the infrastructure caused the first two groups of the day to have poor performance in their servers. The last two groups of the day, which I was a part of, outright had their games cancelled due to players not wanting to play on the essentially unplayable servers. I have had my fair share of CS players complaining about servers, but there was actually enough of an issue here to complain about it. They truly were the worst LAN servers I think anyone would have played on, and it was because of the networking infrastructure not being able to handle all of the clients. We basically were waiting an additional 7 hours after sitting down 4 hours behind schedule to hear when our next match was (we actually got to play exactly one map, de_nuke, prior to this).

LaundersLAN 1.5 or the one after the first one but before this one (the second?) had half of the computers and ran fine. The whole time, the admins could have just made it so that each group plays their matches instead of trying to get two groups done in one timeframe. The later groups would have been playing later, but at least we would have been able to play. This was something they did not try until the next day, when they had already cancelled half of the games in the tournament.

Really, as a player, it felt like things simply were not tested. In the defense of the admins, I don’t think there’s proper tooling out there to test the entire infrastructure easily. You would need a tool that interprets and mimics clients sending in packets to the server and the server would need to respond. There were 90 computers there to my understanding. However, I think there is a way to test all of that to ensure that it is installed properly. People who sat down first stated that apparently the images of the computers that were loaded did not actually have CS2 installed, or at least some people had to install CS2. This would mean that at least, admins would have to ensure than an image for Windows w/ CS2 is loaded onto each computer.

Quite honestly it feels like this event was NA CS in a nutshell. We had literal major attendees mixed in with main/adv/IM players, the event also had Super Smash Bros. Melee for some reason, there was a big production crew, and to boot Launders also uses LaundersLAN to set up his own brand of merchandise. AMD was there as well and they randomly had two computers on the network and using the event’s power to advertise their machines… playing unrelated fighting games. As a player who didn’t even get to play three maps, I felt that the main focus, actual Counter-Strike, was absolutely robbed from me. We did get refunds, but our other perk of being in a cancelled group is that now we’re able to join a $10000 online tournament, yet to be announced.

AN ONLINE TOURNAMENT. For a LAN event. To which most of us had to prepare in advance to make sure that we weren’t all busy that weekend.

To me an event like that just makes me think… why is this aiming to be the premier NA CS event? What happened to all of the smaller events and the players who would attend them? Has Counter-Strike not had a steady supply of new players? Why are the current players being treated like suckers and constantly advertised to? Why does it take so much endorsement and so much money just to get people to participate?
…why would you allow NRG to even participate? Isn’t there some international event that they’d qualify for at this point? This I’m not that much upset about, if it’s an open tournament, everyone should be able to sign up. I’m just more surprised that there wasn’t enough going on for that org to the point of showing up to this for some reason.

The next LAN I am going to is LANETS. While we’ve had issues with the LANETS admins heavily preferring their own university team and letting them do whatever the fuck they want whenever they want, at the very least we were able to play out our games and it’s not like we’ve had to worry about literal top NA CS players playing in these (as much).

NOTE: The LANETS trip never went into fruition, weeks after I had written this I endured a medical issue that I am still having issues with now in May.