Over the past few weeks you've been throwing some questions at me on our forums, Twitter or Facebook, and we've had a great response, in fact so many questions we're going to divide the responses over a few posts during the coming weeks.

Thanks to everyone who sent in a question, here are your answers:

Questions from Blind through the forums:

Does the winding up of epic.RADIO have any impact on the running of epic.LAN?

Not directly, the radio was causing us to lose quite a bit of money in its current operating model, so we had to stop it so that it didn't risk other parts of epic while we reconsider things. We do get some LAN participants through the radio community and we hope those people continue to attend the events because they enjoy them. Some of the radio team will be continuing as LAN staff but helping in different ways.

Is the location of epic.LAN now settled for the foreseeable future? eg 2 years+?

As much as you can foresee these things yes. Both us and the venue themselves are investing heavily in our move there and we see it as being a long-term partnership.

What direction is epic.LAN taking? Casual/Competitive or a 50:50 split going forward?

We plan to keep the split, both sides have been working well for us over the past 12 months and the event isn't sustainable without both. As for the balance of the split, that's down to the people that attend more than us.

Would epic move into other areas to raise profile (e.g. servers like Multiplay?)

We do have some other ideas that we are working on, obviously it wouldn't be appropriate to go into too many details, but anything to keep the company stable is a bonus, particularly if it can support things if we have a bad event in terms of numbers. There was some evidence of these other activities last year with things like the GameShadow battles tournament, we've also done some projects with other large companies recently which all helps to get our name out there.

How does epic.LAN view Multiplay? Competitor or Friend in raising the profile of competitive gaming?

As much as people would like to think we have something against MPUK to make a story, we don't! Plenty of members of the team still attend Multiplay events, we chat with their staff and management over ideas and issues (such as event dates, even if ultimately they have to clash due to venue availability). From a purely business point of view, then yes there are times when we compete mainly for our participants' free time and money because some people do have to choose between one or the other events (we'd prefer it if people didn't have to choose, but that's life). I think the UK does need more than one eSports LAN event though, a monopoly in any industry is bad and having a bit of competition ultimately drives up the quality for the participants of both companies and gives people choice.

Question from Murray-Mint through the forums:

Would you rather fight 100 duck-sized Niveks, or 1 Nivek-sized duck?

1 Nivek-sized duck, why? Because it's only "Nivek sized" and not actually Nivek.

Question from ilumos through the forums:

Will epic.LAN continue to be divided into smaller and smaller rooms?

We'll continue to have a split event as long as we have a venue that can contain it as we recognise that people attend events for different things. In terms of the physical size of the rooms, it's about making the most of our venue to give people the best possible events. If all of the elements of the event continue to grow, then we have plans to scale up the space available to each community rather than decrease. It just happens that the epic.TEN layout arrangements make the best use of the space we have at Kettering.

And lastly for this part, from @iaindude on Twitter:

How much do you have to do behind the epic working?

For epic, a number of us, particularly in the management team, put hours into epic as a whole that are about the equivalent of another part-time job on top of our full-time jobs every week, all on a voluntary basis. As we get closer to the events, that increases to pretty much full-time hours again, like working 2 jobs. There's a lot that people don't see to preparing the events, and the work on each event takes place around 6 months before it actually opens to the participants. Plus there's the work the team does such as games nights, maintaining and developing online services, community management, marketing the events and the boring but important legal/finance stuff that running a limited company requires. When it comes to a LAN itself, for me it's over a week off work to deal with the preparations before and aftermath.

That's all for part 1, more to follow soon!