In July 2010 at epic.FOUR, we announced that we were going to make some changes to the events in order to secure them in the long term. While we're still a long way off where we need to be for epic.FIVE (and that means we need all of you provisionals to book your places ASAP!), we passed two significant milestones this week.

Firstly, we topped the 100 player mark for epic.FIVE, and secondly when we hit 101 participants that made the event officially the biggest epic.LAN so far!

Thank you to everybody who has supported the event to this point, we look forward to seeing you at Uttoxeter Racecourse in a few weeks for not only the biggest event so far, but we hope to give you the best epic.LAN so far!

With £1000 up for grabs at epic.FIVE, and promises of an even bigger tournament at epic.SIX in July, the Counter-Strike: Source tournament is now really shaping up. A good number of teams have now started to confirm their places, with Rasta.Xd and eMpathy leading the way and many more finalising their arrangements.

Teams interested in attending can find full details of the tournament, including the new rules at www.epiclan.co.uk/epic5/css. The map pool for the tournament will consist of:

• de_contra
• de_dust2
• de_inferno
• de_nuke
• de_train
• de_tuscan

epic.LAN Tournament Manager, Kevin ‘Nivek’ Wilson explained, “We’re aiming for a good, traditional CSS tournament at epic.FIVE, nothing too fancy or controversial, just a high quality event run by a professional team. As always though, we’re running the events for the gaming community and we would value any input beforehand so that we can make sure we operate a LAN to remember for all the right reasons!”

More and more of our participants are looking at ways of managing group bookings. Whether it's a competitive gaming clan, or just a group of friends who want to make sure that they're sat together and leave all of the organisation hassle down to one person in the group, (harsh, but fair).

So to help with these group bookings, we have a number of tools available, including the ability to pay for an entire group all together, sit the group members and then hand out the tickets. Alternatively, everyone can buy individually and then hand the control of the seating to a more responsible member of the group, well...maybe responsible or just have the short straw!

Anyway, the processes are quite self explanatory, but if you need any help, we've produced some handy guides below, or you can ask any member of the team in our IRC channel #epic.LAN on Quakenet.

• Group Bookings
• Picking a Seat
• Seating Manager
• Vouchers (transferring group bookings to the members)

We're very pleased to confirm that GamerFM, the radio for gamers, will be attending epic.FIVE this February as one of our coverage partners.

The team will be presenting live from the event to their online station, giving listeners the news and interviews from epic.FIVE as well as all the latest tunes.

Billy Howard, GamerFM Manager said about the event:

"Gamer.FM are really happy to be working with epic.Lan, providing event coverage, music and also interviews with some big names! If you want to listen to great music and great personalities, tune in to us at http://gamer.fm! A big thanks to everyone at epic.Lan for their support! We look forward to meeting with everyone in February"

Participants aged 15 & under are reminded that they are required to bring a signed and completed parental consent form to the epic.LAN events in order to participate.

The current form has been updated and is now available to download:

• Word Format
• PDF Format

Participants are also reminded that they will be required to bring proof of age to the event when they check-in to ensure that they are issued with the correct wristband, particularly for those aged 18 & over who wish to purchase alcohol from the bar.

For a change to our TF2 night during the holiday season, this Tuesday (28th December), we're going to be playing the new Medieval Mode.

We'll start off with cp_degrootkeep. specifically designed for the mode, and then move on to some normal maps with the Medieval Mode enabled.

About Medieval Mode - TF2 Blog

When wars were waged with fists and steel

In this old-tymey Controlle Pointe map, players will battle through an ancient castle. How did the menly men of Team Fortress appear at a tenth century battlement? Simple. The Soldier angered a magician.

Team Fortress creator Robin Walker recently watched The Terminator, and so demanded that weapons could not be brought back in time. That's right: it's melee-only! Against Robin's strenuous wishes, however, clothing can go back in time, which is one way that Medieval Mode is different from The Terminator.

So grab your swords, and keep your clothes on, because things are about to get clothing-non-optional Medieval on your fully clothed ass!

See you in the server!

The epic.LAN management and staff team would like to wish all of our community members a very merry Christmas and a prosperous New Year.

This is the second Christmas for us here at epic, and we'd like to think that we've had two very successful and fun years of organising LAN events and activities for our gaming community and we hope for many more.

We look forward to beginning another exciting new chapter in 2011, beginning with our new tournament series at epic.FIVE, and we hope that you will all be a part of it at our future events.

Enjoy the holiday season, stay safe, and we'll see you in the New Year!

The epic.LAN Team

Most of you had probably heard whispers anyway after a lot of interest on Cadred, however we can now confirm that we will be adding a £1000 Counter-Strike: Source Tournament to the Hall 2 event activities at epic.FIVE.

The team members are no strangers to running CSS tournaments, with experience in running a number of previous competitive events, and we look forward to giving the CSS community a professionally operated gaming tournament.

Tournament signups are now open for both the CSS and TF2 tournaments. As soon as you have confirmed your place for epic.FIVE you can either create a team, join a team or sign up as a merc. Note that you can only participate in one of the main tournaments, though there will be plenty of other activities taking place throughout the weekend for you to enjoy.

If you haven't already, then go and grab your place now for epic.FIVE, and make the most of all the money from your Christmas cards!

Winners

Congratulations to the team lead by pad for winning this year's hunt online! They win 2 tickets for 2011 epic.LAN events and £50 to spend at Kustom.

The Solutions

If you want to keep playing, we'll leave the hunt up for a few weeks yet to see how you get along. But in the mean time, we've produced an answer sheet to explain our twisted thinking on all of the questions.

Feedback

As always, we value your feedback, please let us know what you thought in the discussion thread. Do remember when giving your feedback, that for us as organisers, it's very difficult to predict what anybody is going to do in tackling the questions. We have a logical thought process in place in our minds, but that is often miles away from what people try on the day. Be assured that throughout the entire hunt, the team was watching answers, deciding on appropriate clues (while trying to be fair to teams who already had an advantage from completing the questions) and talking to individuals on teams trying to guide them through, particularly some of the newer players who were trying this for the first time.

You will be glad to know that the total hunt took around the amount of time we intended when we wrote it this year, and while people may have been stuck on one or two questions, they were often balanced out by very quick solutions of others.

We look forward to the next hunt at epic.FIVE!

Yes, in mere hours we'll be releasing our pack of hounds, well clues for the chase around the... ok the analogy isn't really working.

At 6pm Friday 17th December, the teaser questions will be revealed for this year's epic.HUNT Online, followed by the main questions from 12 noon on Saturday.

The top players (number to be determined) will then get a 30 minute head start for the final charge on Sunday, which starts at 12 again for everybody else.

Make sure you have an epic.LAN account and go to the hunt site at hunt.epiclan.co.uk to begin.

Remember, you could be in with the chance of winning 2x epic.LAN tickets to be used at any 2011 event AND £50 to spend over at Kustom PCs.