St. Clair enters No Man’s LAN

by Kenneth Bullock

The well known cliche is that students spend too much time on their laptops, but a college club is using that to its advantage to host gaming tournaments.

The Information Technology Club held its ninth annual No Man’s LAN event in front of the college’s library March 14. NML is an event where gamers can bring their computers and consoles to play socially or to compete in tournaments. More than 200 people including students, graduates and sponsors came to participate.

Tournaments for games including Starcraft 2, DOTA 2 and League of Legends awarded high-tech prizes for its victors. Winners received gaming equipment such as headsets, controllers and memory hard drives.

Nicholas Sylvestre, president of the ITC, helped put together this event. Sylvestre said one of the biggest changes to the NML this year was the inclusion of card games.

“Definitely the Introduction of the card games and card tournaments have attracted more people,” said Sylvestre. “Games like Magicka, Vanguard and Yu-Gi-Oh have never been played at a No Man’s event.”

 NML broke its record of registration, with between 200 and 250 people attending. The event ran around the clock for three days from Friday to Sunday. Many players had slept very little during the event, while others stayed awake all three days.

NML had four more sponsors this year compared to last year’s turnout. One of the sponsors, CG Realms, is a local business that sells vintage games and card games. Jeremy Richard, owner of CG Realms set up a booth to sell cards and other merchandise from the store. Some proceeds from the booth contributed to the profit made by the ITC. Sylvestre and ITC Vice-President, Nico Verrelli approached Richard with the idea.

“They asked me to come down here and I was honoured. I said ‘yeah, I’ll throw $700 in prizes for free and we’ll run a bunch of events and see what we can do to promote this,’” said Richard.

                Sylvestre said for next year he’ll improve upon the Wi-Fi connection. There were some complaints of problems involving frame rates in games. He also plans to add additional games for tournaments and see if he can get more sponsors so there can be more events.