@Purvis

Until you can do these things, shut the hell up about "volunteers" and "plans" for a LAN. It just makes any aspersions you might have that are serious seem absolutely ludicrous and lackluster.


1. The location should be Columbus, Ohio. Let's be realistic here; Columbus is one of the cheapest travel destinations in America. Furthermore, based on the city poll, it seems as if the majority of the community would be within a day's driving distance to Ohio. This means that the travel costs would be greatly diminished for the majority of the community.

Furthermore, for those that cannot make the drive, the airfare to Ohio is incredibly cheap compared to most other metropolitan areas. Averaging at under 400USD a flight, that would make it relatively cheap for even those on the West Coast to participate.




2. With that in mind, you need to look at what - realistically - your prize pool will have to be. In other words, you should look at a prize pool that - between the first two / three teams - should spread out to either equalize or accommodate the price of attendance.

I believe that this would require roughly a 5,000USD prize pool. That is, admittedly, an arbitrary number. However, it does provide a nice breakdown of 3,500USD for 1st; 1,000USD for 2nd; and 500USD for third.

Also under this category, you'll need to look at how you'll get these prize pool funds. A 50USD entry fee per player isn't that expensive (shut up, whiners, I've payed 100USD to enter tournaments I knew I'd never win before), and a 10 team bracket provides half of your prize pool.

Unfortunately, the stream viewership of large events such as these for the USA isn't very high, so you will undoubtedly struggle for advertisers. However, if you can run a few test events reaching out to the Brazilian community and the Latin community in particular, you can easily get upwards of a thousand viewers. If you can get a consistent viewership of even several hundred viewers for your streamed events, then you'll have a much stronger foothold when approaching sponsors for the LAN.




3. Finally (although, perhaps this goes hand-in-hand with #2), you'll need to find a location, and determine the costs of hosting the event. Will you run BYOC events? Will you find a LAN center that comes equipped with computers that can handle pretty much anything? If you find a cheap location - such as a Church gymnasium, or community center - will there be bandwidth issues with streaming? With running so many games at once? How will you get the funding for each of these (hint: "entry fees" will not even come close)?

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