hotels are always the best places to do lans - there's decent food (no, damn packets of salty chips, arb hot dogs & cold drink is NOT food) booze, aircon, security - and - if you get lucky with a geek grrrl, a ready room for the night. (Okay, that last one was really pushing things, but still.. )
All kudo's to the folks who DO set up lans, but I wish more Joburgers got into renting a conference room at one or another hotel, rather than backrooms, garages and scout halls.
Raising the public visibility of gaming by taking over the Rosebank Hotel, or one of the other hotels in the North, and having mayhem and fun erupt in total comfort, takes gaming out of the backrooms and into where it belongs: mainstream and in the faces of the people who's job it is to smile and offer helpful food and drinks to the geeks staggering in with their pc's..
Why should only the corporate wankers and those moron motivational speakers get to book out the Sandton Sun conference centre, and other 'mainstream' high-visibility areas? A couple of hundred gamers or more, have sufficient combined funds to rent just about any place they fancy.
And because the stakes are higher, the sellers of games and hardware can subsidize the event a little more than offering their usual cheap handouts of one or two items. If its a high visibility event, any 'sponsors' know they're not got to get away with being able to hang their posters up, get free advertising and hand out the 1 or 2 arb hardware bits they've been given, for nothing. The hardware and game distributors have nice budgets, which they're not going to use on scout hall lans - but they may well come to the party, if its at the Hyatt, for instance..
