Noble Park Community Centre (2014 - 2015)

After contacting over 100 venues, what was evidently clear is that council restrictions and uncertainty were big factors in a lot of rejections. We shortlisted three venues and finally found a new venue in Noble Park that enabled us to keep the entry fee at $25.00. The location was fairly easy to get to, plenty of on-street parking and could easily fit over 200 players. 2 teeny-weeny problems: not enough power and no Internet.

First problem to solve - how do we power 200 power-sucking PCs under one roof? Lemons and copper weren't going to cut it, nor would the venue's total capacity. We got quotes to upgrade capacity, only to be told no air-conditioning would be available if we did. Bummer. So what do you do when you can't get fixed power? You go against your own total belief that Diesel Generators = Bad for PC's and bite the bullet. Well, not totally anyway. The great thing about having an awesome sponsor like PLE Computers on board to set our minds at ease helped us conduct the right research to find a capable and suitable generator for the event. Phewf! Problem solved.

Now onto problem number 2. When your attendees are used to the 50/50 fibre at Melbourne PC User Group, how do you supply internet to enable popular games to play? We considered the prospect of running a Wireless link from Melbourne PC User Group to Noble Park. No problem, right? Lets just say many months were invested in trying to establish the link. While the venue itself was too low to have line of sight back to Melbourne PC User Group, a nearby oval most certainly did. After many weekends of testing (yes, even all the way to 1:00 AM on Christmas Day) and with some help from the guys at Melbourne Wireless - we finally established a link two weeks before the event - albeit flapping in the wind (network flapping?) at a few kilobytes per second. We were excited. Yes - slower than dial-up, but we were finally successful after 12 weeks. An extensive alignment the following weekend saw us hitting speeds of 40 Mbps but problem 3 emerged during the event when the storms picked up and a tree was used as a guying solution. We literally had network flapping by way of our mast changing alignment, and cable ties at the venue to position a panel antennae pointing to the park.

Our V10.0 event isn't a particularly proud moment in our history. With issues ranging from having to reschedule the League of Legends tournament(s) due to unstable internet, building an on-the-spot server for Counter Strike: Global Offensive due to an oversight and the event coordination team themselves after pouring a combined 1000+ hours into the event preparation so much so that they could barely stay awake on the day - there were many wounds and issues to rectify. Suffice to say, we didn't give up and we certainly never want to have a repeat of the same issue(s) again at any of our events. It wasn't all bad though - we *did* learn a lot about power, how to correctly (and incorrectly) set up a wireless point to point network and what to expect when players are unhappy.

The move away from Noble Park wasn't to do with the aforementioned issues though - the main reason we moved was because we couldn't guarantee venue availability for each school holidays.