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.

Here's the second batch of your questions answered:

Questions from MRated through the forums:

What came first, the chicken or the egg?

The toast soldier came first, the egg was invented to give it something to be dipped in to.

Also what would you call a teacake?

It's like a bun with fruit in it.

Question from ddanblack through the forums:

What happened to the winter epics?

They just weren't getting the numbers to cover the costs, the last one we ran lost a few thousand pounds which all comes from our personal pockets. We may look at it again when we have a wider range of tournaments and more on the community side, but we can't take the risk at the moment. We did put extra lite events instead to cover the gap a little.

Question from Bicko through the forums:

Which is acceptable when playing Yee-Ha: Taybarn or Haybarn? Both? Neither?

It's Haybarn, end of.

Question from Nivek through the forums:

How do you make a flux capacitor?

Beans lots of beans lots of beans lots of beans.

Question from dex through the forums:

Just who is this enigmatic "Administrator" if Winbar is da boss?

And finally for this part, a world of questions from Gumpster through the forums:

What are your future plans to help the UK eSports Scene through expansion of epic.LAN and perhaps even online tournaments like GameShadows?

We need to get the right tournaments in place first, I'm not sure if we have that yet, but for epic.LAN to expand, the gaming communities need to support us too. We do still seem to be off the radar for some teams, particularly the community teams and we need the volume of them to grow.

People seem to think the magic answer is to throw up a massive prize pot which just appears from the mythical sponsorship. Unfortunately sponsors want to see the numbers attending the events first, before they'll get their chequebooks out. So simply, the players support us, we support them back and invest more into eSports, it takes time though.

We're always open to working with other organisations to deliver events such as GameShadow Battles, I'm not sure at the moment if that particular one will be repeated again. But we have the technical skills and resources to do that for people and is something we'd like to do again, maybe some sort of online tournament ourselves to win tickets and raise interest in the future could be looked at.

Are there any areas you are looking at that you have seen other global LANs do and would like to incorporate into epic.LAN?

There are ideas we've toyed with in the past particularly on the casual side and how other EU LANs in particular create an atmosphere for the casual gamers, that's something we're trying to achieve. Like any business, we always keep an eye on what others are doing and pick out some good ideas. It's nice in some ways to see people taking our ideas and standards too.

Some things, I think we do better than other global events, others we still have a lot to learn. I think our approach to paying teams is refreshing, and maybe people still don't realise we're one of the few eSports organisations to pay out in full, right there at the end of the event, no chasing us for months or even years.

One thing is that I definitely want to make a bigger spectacle of our tournament finals in the near future, hopefully the new venue lets us do that.

With closure of epic.RADIO, are there anything publicly you can state of course that you regret most over the last 13 months, is there anything you feel you could have done better or is there elements of the radio you felt should have been much better?

I don't regret anything really with epic.RADIO, it was enjoyable and I think we created a great service that our community obviously appreciated from the moving comments on the final show. Ultimately it was down to finance and perhaps it's the wrong time to be trying to get people (personally or businesses) to pay for something like that. I'm glad we did everything honestly though and paid our license fees in full, plenty of others out there don't.

If we bring it back, there will be significant changes made, and that may include some of the people involved too. I would like to make another go of it at some point, but now is not the right time.

Would epic.LAN ever consider partnering up with smaller LANs to make a UK LAN Tour circuit for competitive gamers?

To be honest, probably not. We've had so many discussions with other organisers before, including console events, and the practicalities just don't weigh up. It's expensive for us to move around different venues as kit is often customised to a particular location. 

How do you personally view UK eSports, is it currently damaged or are people feeling the pinch of economic times, and therefore having an effect on gaming within the country?

We're certainly behind in the UK, I don't think we can just put the blame on the economy as it's not only the UK going through this bad spell. I'm not convinced it's the simple lack of prize money argument either, when in reality only 3-4 teams are going to take away a prize and plenty of the smaller teams know they're not in with a chance, they just attend for the fun of it.

I agree with comments made recently by my Multiplay counterpart, Craig Fletcher, saying that the industry as a whole needs to get behind eSports for us to catch up. The mainstream commercial money isn't flowing in like you get in other countries or even other industries in the UK, and yet it's one of the biggest forms of entertainment around. Marketers who hold sponsorship budgets are feeling the pinch though and do have to justify every penny spent, I know some companies work on figures of around £1 per head at an offline event in terms of sponsorship, well on a 400 player event like epic.LAN, we're not going to be offering prizes in line with the Dota Invitational any time soon!

There's no shortage of people playing games out there, that's for sure, we just need to work out how to get them into the next level of gaming.