As mentioned in this thread already, you're a douche.

Hawk, your lack of willingness to expand your horizons and realize that some people might not be 100% totally satisfied with the presented product continues to blow my mind. That fact alone would atleast be reasonable, but even dumber is how hostile you react. No post was intended to be personal; the only intention was to voice concerns, atleast, until you came into the thread, dropping your bombs of complete and total ignorance.

Anyways, posting this is probably going to be a waste of time; inb4 "fuck off don't come herpderp"

I would just like to point out paying $100 is fuck all

PC gamers are getting so cheap.... $100 for a weekend event is fuck all, $15 a month for an mmo sub is FUCK ALL.

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Apple. i respect your skillz and the scene you and I remember from around 10 years ago, but those days are gone, pc lan games are in decline, and so is the money companies are willing to spend on us. Might i suggest trying your best to keep positive about what we do have left, losing another player is not going to help our cause. you cant seriously say you only come to win a prize.... do you?

your post got me thinking, i wonder if Bioware could give frag a little boost by sponsoring frag and using it to show case some of their work in return. probably been explored I am sure...

$100 is a lot of money to some people, believe it or not.

PC gaming in the traditional sense is on the decline, i agree; but a more contemporary version of it is gaining massive popularity. Games like SC2, LoL, and (HOPEFULLY) CS:GO will be leading the charge. Fraga will need to embrace this, i think.



Not a bad idea. I'd support that, for sure.

while i know $100 can be a lot for some, i don't think it should be all that much for any pc user who puts gamer gear in his PC.

i mean, $100 is whatever the person spending it whats to think its worth. however, i have never understood how the guys at work will not even flinch over spending $100 at the bar for 3-8 hours of drunken fun, and then turn around on tell me that $100 to goto frag for 4 days is outragous. these same people likely have $100 cell phone bills, maxed out cable tv, a full collection of blue-ray disks that they never actually watch, and then wonder why they think frag is to pricey for them.


i am just gonna say it, fraga is a pretty good deal. its a fucking good deal by the simple fact that almost nobody will provide space for 300 people for 80 hours without trying to rape you up the ass in someway, in the form of jacked up food costs, by not allowing you to sleep in the place or by not allowing you to stay past 2am.

i challenge you to "occupy" a private bussiness space via normal commercial trade for 80 hours while spending less than $100. you cant do it.

i am not trying to give you personally a hard time, i just know some lurkers think I am crazy and insensitive for saying its just $100 .

And you're a spoiled child so it all works out.

Unfortunately, Frag isn't big enough for something like this... they'd want a bigger audience.

Well my cousin is one of the graphic designers for mass effect 3, but I'm sure as hell not pulling strings for an event I'm not coming to because of douchebags like Hawk. Yeah, a free copy or two of mass effect might not be much, but at this point, it seems like every bit helps for an event like Fraga.



$100 isn't expensive. Price is not the problem. The problem is the extreme apathy and lack of competition that turns this event into an actual stereotype -A bunch of suped up computers and nerds sitting in a silent room with no excitement whatsoever. How those people that never understood why we did this for a weekend every year is actually becoming a reality. It use to be "hey dude, you are missing out" now its "hey I had a good time, but you didn't miss much".

Even though I have a free pass to the event, I might not justify spending 1% of my whole year as well as driving up and spending other money for room and board just to be with, the seemingly increased population, people like Hawk. Besides those mini-games "hey lets go to the gym to throw a ball around" or paper airplane games, there is actually zero excitement anymore. Besides, I want my excitement centered around my computer monitor if I'm sitting there for 80 hours. Hell, mini-games, there seems to be a dwindling amount of people physically fit enough to compete against me as well. I won the wall sit for 2011 - I never win mini games. Thats right, I'm complained about winning, but wutevs.

It use to be exciting when prizes were drawn and that I might be a lucky guy to win them.. but the fact is I can afford all the shit I want now with an actual job.

If I wanted to go play mini-games (which would be the most exciting part about fraga without the tournaments) I would go to Bible Camp. Don't get me wrong, don't get rid of mini-games at fraga, but don't turn that into the only exciting thing there is anymore either.

On the topic that video games are a dieing industry... I don't think so. There is a pretty competitive scene in SC2 in Alberta as well as other games like Street Figher and counsel games. Its not very hard to organize a counsel tournament with a reasonable cash prize. Fraga could actually switch its business model to have "buy in" tournaments instead of trying to pinch off a bit of their all-but nonexisting sponsorship for a shitty prize.

Diversifying the business model with counsel games might draw a bigger population and create more excitement. Throw a half-rate commentator in there while he talks live while two people duke it out on the big screen in StreetFighter would actually be something I'd sit and watch instead of laddering on SC2. I actually even hate playing StreetFighter.

Doing the same thing over and over every year is boring. Don't make this excuse: "hey you guys are the core group that we love and only want you to come and that this is the perfect size LAN".

Lastly, I just want to pre-respond to all those who say "hey if you have such a great idea why don't you do it yourself". Yeah, maybe if you pay for my time lol. Its bad enough that I spend time on here trying to get organizers to try something new. My approach might suck but hey, I'm no PR rep. I once cared about fraga, now its less and less. Until Fraga responds to that, its just one or two or three or four less customers. But I mean, thats been happening year after year, which compounds until real losses in customers.

this is just my personal opinion, but where things seemed to have gone wrong is;


there used to be a day at lans where someone setup a Q1,2,3,cs server of some sort, and it filled up and stayed full the entire lan, it did not matter what the lan organizers did to distract players with mini-games, that server stayed full. You could offer a $1000 prize, and it would still be full. fast forward to today. I think i have set up the most active TF2 server for the last couple of years, but yet its still a struggle to get a stable population going in those servers, sure not every one likes TF2 as they liked quake back in the day, but in a room of 300 PC gamers, filling a TF2 server should require no effort.

i could speculate as to why its hard to fill a tf2 server, other games, to many people running off for mini games. maybe the game is not as good as i think it is, but is there any game that can keep a server full at frag these days? THIS is the problem as far as I am concerned. not the $100, not the tournaments, not the mini games. The problem is you now go to frag to simply play in a micro bubble with your groupies while playing some obscure game that nobody else plays.

What are the organizers of the lan supposed to do about 300 people playing obscure games, i don't know. The large lans still going seemed to stay large because they have large sponsors who push a forced agenda. you did not go to Quakecon to play UT now do you? Dont think there will be much SWTOR at Blizzcon.


to be fair, satisfying the competitive crowd is a good idea, but i think doing that might require frag to sell out a little, and i don't know if i would like to see that.

I think the reason for full 24/7 servers is that back in the day, Quake and CS were huge games with thriving communities independent of Fraga. All Fraga did was provide the platform for the gaming, which has been lost in translation a little bit with games that don't feature LAN. Fraga still provides a really good platform, im sure nobody would deny that. But theres something in the formula of it that needs to be changed or tweaked to have the wide appeal that it used to.

Appealing to competitive audiences, for example, would take FAR less effort than anyone would expect, i think. By myself, i managed to get around 20 people, many of which i'd never met before, to come to Fraga in the name of sc2. I found them by making a thread on teamliquid.net, which is a popular SC2 forum, and we organized where we'd sit and play shit tons of sc2. This was done independent from Fraga staff, and it took me around 2 weeks of little to no effort to find these people to come.

In edmonton alone, SC2, LoL, and SF have insanely dedicated and thriving communities. I can't speak so much for LoL and SF, but SC2 has tournaments and events like barcraft happening several times a month, and they all pull numbers in the 60+ range. And these are only small time LAN center type deals; i imagine Fraga could have twice the pull. LoL in general is absolutely fucking rampant right now, too. Earlier today, IntelExtremeMasters held their LoL world championships, and when i turned on the stream there 250,000 people watching. That's like 5 times what SC2 drew in terms of viewers. All fraga needs to do is put up a prize (it doesnt really even matter what the prize is), and make sure that it's WELL ADVERTISED (this is FUCKING IMPORTANT), and have LoL, SC2, SF, and some FPS (either CS or Quake) as official tournaments, and attendance will skyrocket. I promise.

I'll even handle getting the starcraft events known, if you guys want.

Have you ever met anyone AT FRAG who acts in real life like he is on the forums?

... Yes... Some peeps were pretty rage IRL last year...

I have no idea what your talking about, rage at a tourney? /sarcasm at least two of the last three years there has been disputes between players that I have witnessed. Last years was worse than normal.

This just in... projectxlan in Calgary offering 300+ participant tourney for $20 tickets ($30) at the door with 3 official tournaments... Hmmmmmmmmmmmm