Dead Men Walking

We have pleasure in opening the Booking Thread for the next

LAN XXIII is on 14th - 17th March

Bookings will be two lots, 1. Internationals, Community Supporters and LAN ATTENDEE Badge, Then 2. Everyone else Booking for this opens 19th of Jan 2013.

The LAN will officially open on Friday morning
The LAN will officially end on Sunday

Please note that the hotel has an 18 years+ booking policy so the minimum age for attending the LAN is 18.

LAN XXII Details:

Dates: Friday 14th - 17th March
Venue: Oliver Cromwell (http://www.olivercromwellhotel.co.uk/), March, Cambridgeshire.
Times: The LAN venue opens at Friday morning and the LAN will finish by on Sunday

dMw Costs:

LAN ATTENDEES

Supporting Member :- £10 (this has not changed)
Non-Supporting Member:- £25 (this includes an automatic upgrade to Supporting Member status for one year)

SOCIAL ATTENDEES

Supporting Member:- £0 (this has not changed)
Non-Supporting Member:- £12 (this includes an automatic upgrade to Supporting Member status for one year)

Hotel Costs:
Bed & Breakfast Accommodation: double occupancy £33 per person per night, sole occupancy £50 per room per night
Room Availability: 35 x Double; 8 x Twin

If you book a Twin Room and want to share the costs of the room then when you post in this thread to confirm your attendance then also make a note of the fact you have a Twin room booked and are looking for someone to share with.

As before, the reduced accommodation and function room rates have been negotiated on the basis that the majority of the attendees will partake of the excellent cuisine offered by either the hotel restaurant's Fixed price, A La Carte or Bar menus.

And YES, there WILL be Steak Night!

Eating at the hotel is NOT mandatory, but I am sure that any attendee from the last couple of LANs will vouch for the quality of both the food and the company!

The Oliver Cromwell offers:

• The Noble Suite - an air conditioned conference room (http://www.olivercromwellhotel.co.uk/conferences.html)
  
• 24/7 access to the suite
• dMw control of entry to the suite
• Late night bar
• Gymnasium
• Large indoor swimming pool
• Eight-person Jacuzzi
• Sauna and Steam room

Amongst other things the LAN will feature:

- A list of officially supported games ( Games TBC)
- Organised competitions
- Official LAN Admins
- Late night gaming

Note for International Travellers:

The LAN accommodation costs are above, it's cheaper if you agree to share a twin bed (two single beds) room with someone of course.

Travel: Any London airport works well, Stanstead & Luton are closest. Heathrow is ok, Gatwick is further but still doable. If you book your flight tickets we'll make sure someone picks you up and takes you back - post on the forums for a lift and you are usually sorted out very quickly as other attending members appreciate the international effort made! Other airports are also a possibility - if in doubt post and we'll see if anyone would be travelling past your airport!

Computer: If you have a shuttle or laptop then you're probably sorted (unless hand luggage rules cause you problems) but if you cannot bring your own PC then post in the LAN section to see if someone is willing to lend you a spare PC for the weekend. Many people have done this in the past and it seems to work well!

Please note that, as previously, by signing below you agree to sign a liability disclaimer waiver form (if not already signed). This is a condition of your attendance at the LAN. Please pm Penfold if you wish to see a copy of it.

You are also free to book your rooms now directly with the hotel on 01354 602890. So put your name down when you have confrimed you have booked in

Remember to say it's for the dMw Lan (to get the subsidised rate) and also give your real name and gaming name.

(If you want to arrive early and stay on the Thursday night you will receive the same subsidised rate).

Once you have booked your room please post below so I can keep track, state if you arriving Thursday as well.

Also if you are booking a room to share please can you put that down and who you are sharing with.

If your looking for a buddy to share with check here Lan Room Mates (http://www.deadmen.co.uk/forum/showthread.php?37457-LAN-XXIII-Room-Mate-List&p=364762#post364762)

List of attendees

• BrotherTobious - Thursday - Double Room - Booked
• Ghosty - Thursday - Twin Room - Booked
• Chaosphere - Thursday - Twin Room Sharing with Peanut- Booked
• Lionheart - No Room Needed
• Fatbob - No Room Needed
• Tutonic - Friday  - Double Room - Booked
• Michelanio - Friday - Double Room - Booked
• Peanut - Thursday - Twin Room Sharing with Chaosphere - Booked
• Gortex - Thursday - Double Room - Booked
• OldBloke - Double Room - Booked
• Tealeaf - dates tbc
  
• Ninja_Freak - Thursday - no room needed
  
• Benny - dates
  
• Suicidal Monkey - Friday - Double Room Booked
  
• ChronosMark - Thursday - Twin Room Sharing with Ash - Booked
  
• Norton - Thursday - Twin Room Sharing with Julzpolz - Booked
• Absolutehype - Thursday - Twin Room Sharing with Ghost - Booked
• Ash - Thursday - Twin Room Sharing with ChronosMark - Booked
• Julzpolz - Thursday - Twin Room - Sharing with Norton - Booked

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Social & Day Trippers

I am going :)

I am going thursday to sunday. twin booked.

Yeah, thursday to sunday for me too.

:)

And just renewed my supporting membership in good time :D Go me.

Will edit with who I am sharing room with as soon as I know!

I'll be there.   Not yet sure which day I will arrive.

Be good to see you all. Remember you can book right now and post below when you have.

I'm in. Thursday till the bitter end.

me too !

Sign me up Toby - Friday arrival.

Sent from my Galaxy S3 LTE.

Sign me up as well toby, will be arriving on friday

Just to update, peanut is coming and me and him are sharing the room :)

Maybe the bridal suite again ;)

Double Room booked form Thurs to Sun.

Not sharing with Ninja this time as am still a bit sore in places and with the added nightmares. :ranting2:

I'm in. Fri-Sat. :yahoo:

Anyone else it gonna be a great laugh

Why isn't my name on the list??

cause you havant told me you are booked in :)

I thought I was shacking up with you?

really I already booked my double and recently it you and gortex :) did think you liked me anymore :P

Get a room you two .... oh wait :rolleyes:

Good to see the organisers are running it as seamlessly as usual  :roflmao:  

:flirty:









J/k of course, we couldn't do it without ya :thumbsup2:

Well Ninja is added who will be next come on guys and girls it a good laugh you know it is?

What about you guys who often say you prefer the smaller, more intimate (steady!) LANs? Get yer name down :thumb:

sheesh.. can't get the staff these days..

double booked Fri/Sat, I will see if I can stretch that to Thursday nearer the date...

I'm in for Fri/Sat. Poss Sunday but will know closer to the time :)

ChronosMark AND Ash twin thurs to sun
norton AND Julzpolz twin thurs to sun
absolutehype sharing with me.

Having deliberated long and hard and following in-depth discussions, we’ve decided that we’re going to cancel LAN XXIII in March.

Sign-ups have been uncommonly slow and we don’t think we’re going to hit a satisfactory number of attendees to make the event viable for those running it or enjoyable for those attending. We’re always conscious that the Spring LAN falls close to the back of Christmas and those associated costs and credit card bills and the recession is continuing to bite.

So, with only six weeks to go until the event and in order to keep our excellent relationship with the hotel, we’re pulling it now so they have time to re-sell rooms and the Noble Suite.

However, on the bright side, we WILL be running the October LAN and many more people have already expressed an interest in attending including attendees many from neighbouring countries.
Normal services will resume in 2014

LAN Admins & dMw Council.

Good job I checked the forum, I was just about to book me & Tox in :(

Nooo...
Room cancelled :-(

Good job I came to check for the number.

I am personally pretty disappointed with this decision as a good 18-20 people seems enough to me to run a lan and that no announcement or note has been put up by the Lan admins or council saying this might be the case if more don't sign up or at least warning those who had that they may be disappointed. As I have just read there are another 3 people who are interested and possibly more who would be interested but were not aware of the situation and need a deadline date to make sure they sign up by.

Guess I best go cancel my holiday and hope I can make the lan in October 9 months time. :sad:

Oh man, gutted.

Let's make October a large one.

0.o

Seems a bit rash... like Gortex said, we had a decent enough number of peeps as far as I was concerned. Sucky.

We have had a long chat about this before posting the cancellation and believe me it's not a fun thing to announce. However it's important to remember that we have a very special relationship with the owners of the Oliver Cromwell that we've built up over the years and we receive a lot of benefits that we shouldn't rightly expect, not least being a heavily discounted room rate, completely free use of their function room and free broadband for what is now a three day stint. I don't have the numbers but from memory the savings are substantial and without them the LAN fees would be much, much higher. What we give them in return for these discounts and freebies is a big fat bar and restaurant bill and an agreement that we will take a certain number of rooms when we visit. Unfortunately as of today we have 20 people signed up (sadly one or two on the list have dropped out for perfectly valid reasons). So we don't have enough people to fulfil our commitment to the Hotel. We also can't hang on to the last minute as we need to play fair with the Hotel.

I can understand the disappointment shown by people in this thread, but I'll be looking forward to the autumn LAN now instead.

• dMw have run LANs twice a year for a significant number of years and we will be running one this autumn for which interest has already exceeded that for this cancelled spring LAN.  
• We've never had to consider cancellation of a LAN before, but at the time the LAN Admins and dMw Council started monitoring sign up numbers we had only 11 people signed up to the LAN and whilst more have since signed on, numbers have still not reached acceptable levels for the organisational work involved.
• Historically we have seen bigger sign ups this close to the LAN and we've typically seen reductions in the participating numbers in the final few weeks (for example, some of those signed up on this thread have already cancelled) and this was a consideration.
• We considered that a timely cancellation of the LAN, whilst no doubt extremely disappointing, was better than a later cancellation where dMw & members might suffer cancellation costs.
• By cancelling with reasonable notice, we give the hotel sufficient opportunity earn revenue from those now empty rooms and this helps our long-standing and positive relationship with them.

We are sincerely sorry that this decision has to be made, but it was unanimous and I believe a correct decision given the comparatively low level of interest shown and the close proximity of the planned event.

Well this sucks. How many people are required for a LAN then?

It's a combination of factors, but at the last meeting it was agreed that ideally we wanted in excess of 30 people but with a minimum of 27.   This number was based on previous LAN attendance, issues resulting and feedback.

can I make a suggestion then.....

Which is in future have this statement added to the main post which goes out advertising the Lan. It seems there is an issue with miss communication with the main body of the community and for those who had signed up under the impression they were looking forward to 6 weeks time for beers, gaming and mates.

As mentioned I don't have an issue with the decision as these things some times have to be taken, but in the way it has been translated to the community. Perhaps put in a deadline date that requires a number of 30+ people to attend. If anything it might help those who are going, to then advertise it more to the wider world and get their friends/mates to try out the community and join for a great gaming weekend and boost numbers.

Of course, we can always add a proviso and will do for the future.   It's not a situation we ever had to deal with before so we did not anticipate the need for one.

Do I need to ring up to cancel my room, or will the hotel automatically close all the dMw bookings for then?

We have told the room to cancel our hold on the Noble Suite for the  Friday and Saturday (it was unavailable on Thursday) as it was and told  them to free up the block hold on rooms.

We have NOT told them  to cancel all your bookings. I'm not sure we would even be allowed to as  it's a direct contact between the hotel and the guest.

Quote from: Chaosphere;366051Do I need to ring up to cancel my room, or will the hotel automatically close all the dMw bookings for then?

Even if they've already been asked to cancel all the dMw bookings, I would still give them a call to double-check - I have.

Yeah choas cant hurt  mate

Just to reiterate:

Quote from: Penfold;366052We have told the room to cancel our hold on the Noble Suite for the  Friday and Saturday (it was unavailable on Thursday) as it was and told  them to free up the block hold on rooms.

We have NOT told them  to cancel all your bookings. I'm not sure we would even be allowed to as  it's a direct contact between the hotel and the guest.

Please call the hotel to cancel your own rooms.

Anybody fancy organizing a mini LAN somewhere in that case?

This is a BIG BIG shame :sad:, especially as 5 of us from my group missed out list time and were looking forwards to coming this time. How far away are we from the "desired" number of attendees? I have 2-3 people who have been considering coming for years... im sure i can sell them into it to make up the numbers... im sure i am not the only person who could do that also. I also know Jay very well, who has attended before and I am sure i can convince him. Would be great to have an opportunity at least to save this LAN. :taz:

agreed with the chance to save it kinda thing, surely you guys could have given us a warning so we could arrange new blood to join to make up the numbers? Also some money is better than no money for the hotel. its not usually packed with other people when we are there and tbh looks like they could do with any amount of business albeit smaller than usual...

I have a possible 2-3 people also who would be interested also. I will ask.

Quote from: JulzPolz;366059This is a BIG BIG shame :sad:, especially as 5 of us from my group missed out list time and were looking forwards to coming this time. How far away are we from the "desired" number of attendees? I have 2-3 people who have been considering coming for years... im sure i can sell them into it to make up the numbers... im sure i am not the only person who could do that also. I also know Jay very well, who has attended before and I am sure i can convince him. Would be great to have an opportunity at least to save this LAN. :taz:

I'm also very upset by this decision, just heard the news from Scott. Would definitely have been nice to have heard about the concern re: numbers sooner so that this LAN could have potentially been saved :sad: I have a few avid gamers at my new company who I was trying to get down for this time and/or next. And I second the comment by CrazyHorse, the hotel definitely looks like it could do with the business :g:

Gents, just to underline this, the decision was far from taken lightly and wasn't aimed to put people out. There was some discussion in the admin forums and if the argument is that we should have been clearer, then my hands up.

The truth is the March LAN didn't garner the attention that it has in previous incarnations, the take up wasn't as strong and we had to make a quick decision between acceptable notice for people needing to cancel and the hotel holding good on it's commitments. We in admin land didn't want to cancel this any more than anyone else, but post homously coming up with a list of people that we can try and convince won't help. If people were interested in going we shouldn't have to talk them into it.

Yes we could have handled it better, no it's not great (it's the first ever cancellation in my time here) and sorry it's come to this.

October will have a minimum commit and a sign up by date.

Yeah, is a shame that this is now cancelled. I can also ask to see if a few additional people will be interested. How many people are we short? About 7-10?

Pulling 20+ people from the hotel for 3 night stays sounds like a serious revenue killer though... There is no way that they could recoup that surely... They gotta be making £200-250 per person easily... so they are going to lose 4-5k just from those 20 people. We are unique clientele that not only rent the rooms, but also eat tons of food and drink copious amounts of alcohol... Normal clientele just wouldn't be doing this. I just cant understand how the hotel cannot be benefiting from us being there (even in 20) and I really cant see the point of view that they are doing us a favour. I work with hotel owners in my job and they would all see the benefits of 20 food eating, beer drinking, non-leaving, 3-day hotel clientele. The only thing they really loose is the quality of their wifi for other guests, which in March i really cant see being a massive issue.

This is a real shame, as I know how much work goes into all of the organisation for these events and probably many hours have already gone on this event. I would like to thank everyone involved anyway as this must be pretty gut-wrenching for them more so than just us attendees.

If anyone is interested in rekindling something let me know as I may be back from the US in time to make this, even if its just a meet down the pub or something would be great to see you all again!

Thank you again to all of the organisers and the community for supporting.

Chin up lads and lets make the Autumn one a complete blow out!

DZ

It's not the end of the world chaps, lets not over-react. Cancelling now is the sensible option, doing it at the last minute would be a major pain for most people attending.

Maybe we should try to organise a social event to make up for the lack of a LAN. Cambridge pub crawl anyone?

Guys we are really sorry this has happened and we did try once we made a decisions to try and contact all that might be interested.  Unfortantly a few people who had already signed up cant make it and some of those that came back to us couldn't either.  Based on this information and other factors we made this choice which we didnt want to.

We really want this to work but we felt it couldnt work as is.  It is only a cancelling it is not the death of the Spring LAN just number XXIII

I'll echo what DZ and Tut have said.

Let's plan some other sort of meet up :) And look forward to the next LAN now. No point flogging a dead horse :D

Sorry guys, I was just in the process of booking and was on the phone to the hotel when I read the update. I think the problem for me has been I'm in Asia, Amsterdam then the US for 3 out of the 4 weeks in March so I had to wait to the last minute to make a decision. I suppose it's not useful to wait too late as a minimum number is needed to justify the event.

I prefer the smaller LANs.

I can understand the decision, while I also understand people are a bit miffed I think it's good you were given plenty of notice out of curiosity what is the ideal number of bookings you look for in which a Lan will go ahead?

Quote from: TeaLeaf;366047It's a combination of factors, but at the last meeting it was agreed that ideally we wanted in excess of 30 people but with a minimum of 27. This number was based on previous LAN attendance, issues resulting and feedback.

Is the numbers for your info.

Thanks Toby

Quote from: Sn00ks;366112I prefer the smaller LANs.

You missed a 'g' Sn00ks.

Quote from: Benny;366144You missed a 'g' Sn00ks.

Pffft!

....damn, coffee all over the keyboard alert! :roflmao:

all i'm gonna say is http://store.steampowered.com/app/227300/ - will keep till Oct though (and allow more practice time !!)

Hoping you can pick up immigrants and hookers it that, it's not real if there's no murder.

Immigrants sounds fun. Maybe there'll be a game where you're an Aussie customs officer and you get to initiate the cavity search ;-) ;-)

Sent from my LG-P880 using Tapatalk 2

when is the new one going up? :)

Not until the Summer !

Pub me down as social/day visitor please :)

Da this is not it are you supporting member?

Sent from my Nexus 4

To expand on that, this is for LAN XXIII, the next LAN is LAN XXIV.   The Booking thread (which is filling up rapidly) is in the Supporting Member section at the moment.    Become one and you can book now (and it's cheaper than going to the LAN as a non-supporting member).