We've now finalised the epic.ELEVEN casual timetable to bring you regular big games through the event with a load of fun tournaments too! You can expect to find your favourites from Unreal Tournament 2004, to Trackmania to Dogfighter. For those eagle-eyed amongst you, yes, the epic.Quiz has been confirmed for Friday evening, ensuring we get chance to Boat Race!

The following fun tournaments are also confirmed:

• Minecraft create (build competition running the duration of epic.ELEVEN)
• L4D2 Survival (highest Survival score at the end of epic.ELEVEN)
• Half Life 2: Deathmatch Ladder
• F1 2012
• Wii Mario Kart

Rules for the tournaments as always will be shared at the start of the event.

The epic.ELEVEN timetable page has been updated and will continue to be so as the rest of the schedule is locked in.

The last few seats for epic.ELEVEN are selling fast; if you've not yet confirmed yours, do so now to avoid dissapointment for what will be another epic event! 

We've listened to your feedback from the last event, and the venue has agreed to open the bar later for all of you late night LAN gamers at epic.ELEVEN!

So this time, the bar will be open:

Thursday

2pm - 4pm - Downstairs bar open while you wait to check-in

4pm - 2am - Fair Isle Bar

Friday & Saturday

12noon - 2am - Fair Isle Bar

Of course we need to remind everybody that all alcohol must be purchased from the bar and you cannot bring your own on site.

News just in, regular supporters of epic.LAN, Roccat, will be sending along some great prizes to boost our new League of Legends tournament! The top teams in the tournament will get the chance to win:

• 5 x Roccat Isku
• 5 x Roccat Savu
• 5 x Roccat Sense Chrome Blue

Make sure you're signed up to our epic.ELEVEN League of Legends tournament to be in with a chance of winning!

OK, we gave in to the pressure and have decided to put on a small SC2 tournament for epic.ELEVEN to introduce the community to our events and hopefully grow in the future.

Sadly we haven't seen the signup numbers that we would expect from some of our other games, and following a load of interest from SC2 players, we've decided to give them the space instead as we host our first tournament in association with GameSocial.

We've made some space for the SC2 community on our seating plan, tournament signups are now open, so once you've booked your place, you can join in the tournament!

Tournament places are initially limited to 32 players with prize triggers from £250-£1000. Depending on initial interest, we may be able to raise this limit.

We look forward to seeing the community at epic.ELEVEN this July!

After many many years (far too long!), we're dropping PayPal as our main payment processor. Our new payment provider, through Sage Pay, will give normal card payment facilities as you would expect with any online shopping site as well as still allowing for PayPal transactions should you wish.

Sage Pay will be handling the card payments entirely and therefore security of your transaction, so we don't see all of your card details!

Our preference is for as many people as possible to use a Debit Card as this gives the lowest fees on the transaction, but the usual card methods are there for you to use.

Why not try it out, by grabbing an epic.ELEVEN ticket now, afterall, it is payday time for some of you! 

After a great month of games in May, we're back for our June series of Mid-Week Mayhem. As usual, games will kick off at around 8pm, so make sure you're in our IRC (Quakenet #epic.LAN) or Teamspeak channel for more details.

With epic.ELEVEN fast-approaching (a mere 9 weeks away), it's time to start putting together our timetable of big games and fun tournaments.

As usual, we will be compiling a programme of activities away from the prize-winning tournaments for people to take part in, you don't have to play in them, but it gives people a chance to enjoy some big games with as many of the other participants as possible, so go ahead and give your suggestions on our forums.

For our fun tournaments, we're probably going to run something on Minecraft again, as well as an FPS, Console and Racing game. And don't forget the epic.HUNT also returns this time for those looking for a more cryptic challenge.

Note that we don't schedule in smaller games, there's plenty of time for you to organise your own, so we're looking at about 16 players upwards for the big games,  we also don't schedule in the non-computer gaming stuff like board games, Werewolves etc. but there are tools like the TweetWall, forums, internal IRC all available to help you organise your own activities too.

If you usually pay for your LAN tickets and services by bank transfer, please note that we have changed accounts and therefore have new BACS and IBAN details. Please delete the old details from your banking service and pick up the new ones next time you pay.

Note that if you use the old ones once the account has closed, your payment will get bounced back by your bank, delaying your ticket purchase.

After the fun and games with internet connections at epic.TEN, we promised to keep you updated with things for epic.ELEVEN as things are confirmed, but we wanted to wait until things were physically in place before we made any promises. 

As a reminder at epic.TEN we had:

• 5 ADSL connections giving us 35mbps down and 5mbps up but over multiple lines. Of these, 1 was reserved for Dota2 and 1 was reserved for priority use for server updates, IRC, DNS and database connections.
• 54mbps from the satellite connection, which was completely down for around 7 hours of the event, and intermittent for the rest meaning we had to entirely fall back on the 35 mbps from the ADSL during those times.

So far, there are now 3x FTTC lines already installed and running at the venue which gives us approx 195mbps down and 60mbps up. So that's already significantly more than we had available at epic.TEN, especially when the satellite connection was down. They are also over fewer connections, so this will allow things like higher quality streams to be delivered as they require a high upstream over a single connection - at epic.TEN we could only use the satellite connection for streaming video, now we can provide multiple streams on a single connection.

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Over the past few weeks, numbers for our regular Tuesday and Thursday games nights have been dropping, so we've decided to have a bit of a relaunch and do something different over the next few months..

From 8th May, we'll be starting our Wednesday "Mid-Week Mayhem" at 8pm each week, and instead of just having a big game every week, we're going to be mixing things up a bit. Sometimes we'll be running a staff vs. punters game, we'll be laying down challenges to some of our competitive teams and communities that attend the events and some weeks we'll just be running a normal big game.

We're going to be a bit more organised too, and get the whole month of activities published in advance as well as set up as Steam and Facebook events to try to get more people along.

Plus, when we have the staff vs. punter evenings, we're going to be streaming those games for a bit of a laugh on our twitch.tv channel so everyone can watch the staff get rolled!