[jwie]

I definitley think it's on the product side that LAN parties died. The relationship between the player and the game, and the LAN community and the game were way different.

Gradually the companies figured out how to inject themselves into the social structure. Your relationships became mediated by these products. Rather than a social lubricant they became the relationship itself. They monetized that social capital.

You didn't play WoW with your friends anymore; you played WoW because that product allowed you access to your friends.

Some superguilds figured out how to hop games and maintain that social structure, but only the most organized and intentional. Gradually these LAN groups eroded as people got jobs, families, etc. Perhaps that was why the MMO declined; those friendship structures became compromised by the product, and people also developed constraints on their time by things like, spouses, children, and careers.

[fxtentacle]

Fully agree. I still regularly organize LAN parties with the same crew as back then. 24 years and counting... Family has made finding a suitable date much more difficult. But the biggest obstacle is finding LAN-capable games.

10 people joining Dota 2 from the same IP results in instant ban for everyone. StarCraft 2 is horribly laggy when 10 PCs compete for UDP traffic to the internet server. GTA 5 keeps load-balancing us into different lobbies. Most new games just cannot handle a LAN party anymore. And yeah, I remember the time when I paid for a WoW account despite not playing because the WoW guild chat was the quickest way to reach all of my real-life friends.

Warcraft 3 fun-maps, Left 4 Dead 2, Flatout 2 are the games that reliably work well.

[gdprrrr]

And then there's Anno 2070 which fails at login (it requires an account and an internet connection) for a second player in the same home network.

[DrSiemer]

OpenRA is the only thing that really works for an ad hoc LAN party on whatever laptops we have with us when we get together with the old crew.

We join over public servers, so we skip the classic LAN curse (spending an entire day getting it all connected properly, then only having time left for maybe 1 or 2 rounds of actual play).