Winter WonderLAN 2024

Halo Infinite · House LANister

📅 Jan 20, 2024

Sixteen people, four teams of four bought at auction, and a LAN that ran from lunchtime to about half past ten. Three things this one tried are worth recording. Timeouts were new -- three two-minute timeouts a team, invented to formalise the bathroom breaks people were taking mid-series -- and every team used them and nobody kept to two minutes, some running ten or fifteen; the post-mortem's answer is not to drop them but to allow one each, for five minutes. A snake draft was worked out in parallel with the auction and never used, kept in the workbook to compare the two ways of picking teams. And the last board carried a booby prize for the lowest CSR, which landed badly enough with the person who won it that it was never run again -- the post-mortem argues in the same breath that fewest games played or least CSR gained would have measured what the prize was actually for. The night is also the reason the next LAN's rules talk about warm-up games: people played them constantly between series, and eighteen of this LAN's seventy-five archived matches are Octagon aim maps, bot free-for-alls, Hex A Gone and a game of Duck Hunt Minecraft Christmas.