What was it?
Four Days of gaming insanity!
http://www.millionmanlan.com/Default.asp
Just how many people? I haven’t seen any official numbers. Over a thousand. I saw one blog reporting about 1700!
On the way
I passed this truck on the drive down to Louisville Thursday. Thought it was a funny coincidence since we were all getting ready to drive these around in the game “Battlefield 2” over the next few days. It’s like they were bringing them down for us to play with.
UT tourney
I suck…a lot.
This was my big event, and started on Saturday. In the opening round (an 8 player all vs all match) I managed to stay out of last place which sent me on to a bracket with the top 64 players for a series of 1 vs 1 matches.
Since I sucked it up pretty good (with only 14 frags) I was seeded 60th up against the 5th seed. This match was brutal, utterly brutal. When the score was 20 to 0 in the first 5 minutes, I knew to pretty much give up hope of winning…the motivation had changed to simply frag the other guy at least once. Half-way through…I killed… myself. Score is around 30 to -1. At this point a crowd has gathered to watch the two of us. For the most part the crowd was kind since they could tell I was in WAY over my head. There were boisterous cheers for me anytime I even managed to get a shot in on the other guy. With the last 5 minutes to go, I got him. Yes, I actually took him out. The onlookers went crazy. The score was about 40 to 0. In the closing minutes I actually fragged him twice more! Despite chants for an impossible comeback, the match ended somewhere around 57-2.
I didn’t know it at the time, but it turns out that the player “GiMiX” is a pro-level UT gamer (yes, there is such a thing) and is possibly the best UT player in the country. GiMiX went on to win the tournament and grab the $1500 up for grabs.
After losing that match, I also took a bad loss to Grim (who was also in my opening round) in the “losers” bracket (the competition was double elimination). This loss didn’t bother me as I was still stunned from the previous beating.
Looking back, it was an amazing gaming experience…to not just meet the top guy in the country, but actually play him 1v1 for 15 minutes. I think I learned more about playing Unreal in that 15 minutes then I have in 5 years.
File Sharing
As expected there were tons of file servers at million man lan last weekend. I figure there were about >1500 gamers there, most of whom had a share (or several) full of stuff. There were also a number of dedicated ftp servers, here’s one list (there was another list of more similar to this):
Even just with just these FTP servers (not including the shares), that’s a LOT of terabytes!
I was pretty conservative on my downloads (looking for quality, not quantity) since you can easily find yourself out of room. Generally speaking I snagged:
26 albums and a couple dozen singles
16 movies
44 music videos
9 games
17 other apps
Don’t know the total, but I’m guessing around 80GB. Someone is our group said he was up to around 300GB.
Sleep
Yeah, right…I like to think of it as moments of unconscious.
Friday morn ~6:30am – 8am
Saturday morn ~6:30am – 8:30am
Sunday morn ~6:30am – 8:30am
So, what’s that? Llike 5 and a half hours over 4 days! It’s like college finals weeks all over again.
