Respawn LAN v17 Powered by Tt eSports Options

[Zardoz]

Respawn LAN v17 Powered by Tt eSports
July 3-4th 2010, La Trobe University, Bundoora

Melbourne's most successful BYO PC LAN gaming event is BACK FOR MORE and what better way to spend Melbourne's coldest winter nights than inside a hall immersing in the glow of 400 PCs?

Continuing on our tradition of delivering the best LAN experience, our 17th event announces the biggest swag we've seen in recent times! Thanks to our wonderful sponsors, Tt eSports by Thermaltake, Fractal Designs and Wild Wire for their amazing support! Check these prizes out:

Counter-Strike Source 5v5 (total prize pool over $2000!)
1st place: 5x ThermalTake eSports Challenger PRO gaming keyboard + 5x Fractal Design Define R2 PC gaming case
2nd place: 5x ThermalTake eSports Black Gaming Mice

Call Of Duty 4 (total prize pool RRP $720)
1st place: 5x ThermalTake eSports Challenger PRO gaming keyboard
2nd place: 5x ThermalTake eSports Black Gaming Mice

They'll also be kicking in an additional set of the keyboard, mouse and a Shock Gaming Headset which we will be giving away.

We'll be annoucing prizes soon for the following:
Flatout 2
Team Fortress 2
Armagetron
HAWX
Starcraft
GRID
Half-Life 2 Deatmatch
Counter-Strike: Source GunGame

We are also introducing a PRE-PAY system (via PayPal) which will not only guarantee you a spot (auto-confirm) but entitle you to have guaranteed seats, faster check-in and personalised player tags with your nick printed waiting for collection when you arrive.

Registrations open Thursday 9PM. Stay tuned for more exciting things that we'll be announcing shortly...

[Zardoz]

Hi,

One of the core motivating points to introduce a pre-paid system is to ensure that we don't get hit with the financial burden of no-shows. We have seen a disturbing trend in recent events where many players would register, then confirm, then not show. This is grossly unfair to the 300 people plus who are on the waiting list and aren't sure whether they can attend, so they simply turn away, leaving empty seats that we paid for.

The problem here is this: if you cancel two days before the event (and this is the timeframe when you are likely to know that you can't attend, i.e. illness, family emergency and so on), we would have already catered for you in our planning and thusly would not only need to refund you but would lose money on the seat we have provided for you. At short notice, it's hard to reallocate this seat to another person as by then, the majority of people on the waiting list would have assumed they cannot attend and may have made other plans.

Most ticketing agencies (Ticketek, Ticketmaster) will only refund if an event is cancelled and this is our stance on the issue as well. If there are extreme circumstances, then we'll lend an ear however at this stage, I think it's safer for everyone to say that we won't be handing out refunds. The solution to this would be to make these bookings transferrable, so that you could log in and assign your pre-paid location to someone else who has not registered. We haven't implemented this as yet.

Remember that nobody makes a profit out of Respawn LAN events (except for our sponsors, of course!) so the money we lose directly affects the community 1:1.

I hope this clears a few things up.

-z.