We are happy to announce that our official coverage partner for the first TF2 Community LAN ever will be none other than QuadV! They will bring a full coverage team to supply our main tournaments with live coverage of the best quality.

This is what you can expect from QuadV regarding The Community LAN:

• LIVE video stream of matches spread over the whole event
• Video’s on Demand on the QuadV website

Afternoon ladies and gentlemen,

We’ve finally decided on some official times for the event.

• Games will start at 20CET on Friday evening.
• The prize ceremony will be at 16CET on Sunday afternoon, meaning all games will be finished by that time.

If you have any specific requirements for attending or leaving the event at a different time, please contact myself (TCM|dunc) or Amonsilas (Fruit`Amonsilas) on #thecommunity and let us know ASAP. We’ll try to take you in to account wherever possible.

Payments - A REMINDER!

We really need people to start putting their money forward now. The absolute final deadline for making payments is the 20th June - that’s less than one month from now.

The link to the payment page is here: http://www.thecommunitylan.com/payment

Once we’ve got a few teams paid the others will flood in. Please encourage your team to put forward their payments as soon as possible.

We are just nine small weeks after the official announcement and not even a month after the opening of our sign-ups. We can happily say that we’ve received an encouraging number of fourteen teams signed up for the event. This is, of course, a nice start and pretty close to our minimum amount of teams, but we will not stop right here. We have more than six weeks to go until the event and we are still in contact with loads of teams - all possible attendees. Furthermore we can proudly say that we already have eight of the ten best teams from Europe signed up to the event.

First sponsor

Second of all we have some more good news. SteelSeries have announced their support of the first Community LAN event. They will be providing hardware prizes for the silver tournament. This is great news for the teams entering the silver tournament and also provides exceptional credibility for The Community LAN. We are very proud to announce our partnership with SteelSeries and hope this makes it clear to everyone that we will not stop where we are now.

Mix teams

Two weeks ago we set up our mix page after big demand by the community. This page is dedicated to individuals and incomplete teams looking for other attendees to form a team on the event. As a matter of fact, arranging a team to play with is as easy as making a simple post with some information about yourself. When everyone who asked us about the page uses it, we should definitely be able to get a fairly nice amount of mix teams sorted out. Let me state once again that this is not just for individual players looking for a team, but also for half-formed teams looking for some extra players to complete their line-up!

Accommodation

Moving on to our venue and facilities. WZZRD are now accepting e-mails regarding accommodation. Please note that all of the good rooms are “first come, first served”. All the information you will need about accommodation can be found on our website. The accommodation that can be booked through WZZRD will definitely save you a lot of money, compared to the regular city hotels or Bed & Breakfast locations. If that has not convinced you yet: we can assure you that you will not find any accommodation closer to the event.

Visitors

For anyone that is not actively playing Team Fortress 2 in a competitive way we have also got visitor tickets available. If you enjoy watching matches, like LAN tournaments, want to be part of this unique event or just want to support us by paying us a visit on one or more days, than this is exactly what you are looking for. You will have full access to the LAN area and be able to spectate every ongoing match LIVE, residing just a few meters away from the action. We got some nice deals available for both one day and full event visitors. Make sure you drop by and be there when it all happens! (payment information)

What are you waiting for?

We hope that if you had any doubts left about attending, this post may have served to eradicate them. Do not hesitate any longer. This will be a unique and spectacular event, the greatest Team Fortress 2 event to date. If you are not coming with a team, sign up for a mix team or gather some friends and make one yourself, but be sure to register it. If you are not able to play in any way, make sure you do not miss anything and visit us at WZZRD Enschede. What are you still waiting for? Sign up now!

Thanks to ETF2L, we have been provided with a fairly simple solution for our LAN signups.

Signups are NOW OPEN for The Community LAN!

To register your team for The Community LAN event, please head over to ETF2L and follow these steps:

1. Go to http://ETF2L.org
2. Make sure you’re logged in.
3. Go to “Site Admin” in the top right corner of the screen.
4. Click “Teams” on the left side of the screen.
5. Click “Register Team“, the blue hyperlink above the table.
6. In the “Team Type” box, select “LAN Team [6v6]“
7. Register the rest of your team details as you usually would.
8. Once the team is fully registered, start adding your players by navigating to the “Teams” link on the left hand side then clicking “Edit Roster“
9. Add the appropriate players - make sure their STEAM IDs are correct as they will be checked.
10. Once all of the players are added, click the “Competitions” button on the left side.
11. Tick the box next to your LAN team to add to TCL Golden Tournament. Adding to this signs your team up to the whole event. Other tournaments will be opened later.
12. Proceed to the PAYMENT stage.

Paying for the LAN

Amonsilas has written a payment guide here which should make payments easy for you and your team.

Once your payments have been received you will be sent an e-mail with a receipt and an entry ticket. Once your full team has paid, or at least 6 players have, you will be ticked as paid and we will update our website to reflect your admission.

Morning ladies and gents,

There has been some discussion about the shared “turn up and play” PCs that will be used at The Community LAN.

I would like to clear up a few things with some simple statements:

• There will be 54 PCs available
• The majority of those PCs will be for use in your team but there will be a few available for general internet usage outside of the games
• PC usage will be scheduled - we will organise warmup practice games for each team before their scheduled “official” games
• If a team doesn’t turn up to a PCW, a mix team will be formed to take their place - we’ll develop an efficient system to allow this to happen quickly and easily
• Each team will get, on average, 4 to 8 hours of play per day depending on how they fare in their respective tournaments

We appreciate that the venue is pretty small, but we simply can’t afford to hire out a huge hall with less than 200 attendees. We would barely be able to cover the costs which would massively impact the prize funds for each tournament.

I think most people that have attended LAN events in the past will have few problems with not having a dedicated PC. This event will be an impressive social event with crowds gathering to watch casted games and discuss/debate. It’ll be STV chat in real life…

This weekend we have made some final, important decisions about the upcoming LAN event.

Dates

The first Community LAN event will start on Friday July 3rd and finish Sunday July 5th. It will be a three day event, probably finishing mid-afternoon on the Sunday.

Prices

Let me first, clearly state, there will be no BYOC spaces. Unfortunately the size of the location and the small team dedicated to running the event means bringing your own computer will not be a possibility - there simply isn’t space. Instead, we will be offering shared “turn up and play” (TUP) spots for a mere 50 euros for the three days.

Attendance

We are initially working on a (hopefully) pessimistic figure of sixteen teams attending. WZZRD can provide up to 54 PCs, so with 16 teams attending, 50% of the players will be able to play at the same time. We appreciate that shared computers aren’t an ideal scenario but we believe with this many available it won’t be a massive problem. Anyone that simply wants to spend the full weekend at their PC probably shouldn’t turn up anyway!

Minimum prize fund

With zero sponsor input (obviously we’re approaching sponsors and hope to rectify this in the very near future) we are guaranteeing at least a 1500 euro prize fund. We hope to at least double that figure when we have secured sponsors, as well as providing hardware prizes for the lower division tournaments.

The Concept

After a period of few quality LANs for Team Fortress 2, and an even smaller number of events with a reasonable cash prize, a few key members of the community came together to organise a dedicated TF2 LAN event. Placed in the middle of Western Europe, Holland was the natural location and the internationally known game-café WZZRD Enschede was considered to be the perfect venue.

Our main aims were as follows:

• Give the community a LAN worth attending
• Majority focus on TF2 - preferably TF2 only, though if sponsors were lacking, additional games could be brought in for coverage
• Sizeable prize pot, but with a guaranteed minimum
• Multiple tournaments where the teams outside of Division One could compete for smaller cash prizes or hardware
• Create a project base for future events to be built on

We will be going out of our way to ensure the coverage for this event provides positive brand establishment for the European TF2 community by bringing in well known, big brand sponsors (including the possibility of the lead sponsor having name rights for the event) and providing significant media coverage in the form of game streams, commentaries and radio interviews with the players.

We have had positive interest from the community thus far, with the majority of the top 10 teams saying they would be interested in attending together with a number of other teams. The interest thread on the European Team Fortress 2 League’s community forums indicated we could expect well in excess of 20 teams for the July date we’ve initially set.

Please keep coming back to the website. Once we have more news, we’ll keep it updated, which will be in the very near future.