We're very excited to confirm Dota 2 as the third of our competitive tournaments for epic.TEN next February with a potential prize pot of up to £3000.

Obviously the game is still evolving and we're keeping an eye on how the game and competitive community develops between now and the LAN, but we've had so many members of the UK Dota community getting in touch with us over recent weeks asking us to host one of the first UK LAN tournaments for the game, and of course we really wanted to introduce a strategy game for the event!

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We're pleased to welcome a number of new members in to the epic.LAN team:

• Beej & LZ_Stealth - Both familiar faces to epic.RADIO listeners, they will be joining the Event Team for epic.TEN, helping you out with all of your event queries during the LAN.
• Orcl - A name that many of our competitive players will recognise as a former Cadred writer and currently working with Reason Gaming, Orcl joins us to add to our tournament coverage during the events.
• And finally, another epic.RADIO face, and also well known in the competitive CS community, Gumpster joins the LAN team to work on our new CS:GO tournament.

We are still looking for tournament admins particularly for COD4, CSGO and possible MOBA titles for the event, if you're interested and have experience in these areas, then please do get in touch. Also if anybody is interested in helping out purely on our shop/helpdesk then let us know, though we would ask that you have some experience of attending our events before you apply for these areas.

We've now created the seating plans for the new venue, which means it's time to go and pick your seat for epic.TEN, once you've booked your ticket of course!

Here's a little bit about each room (by the way, the names are all UK lighthouses and are the names used at the venue, so we've decided to stick with them so you can follow all the signs when you get there):

• Fair Isle - The tournament room (or 'Hall 2' from our old venue), so if you're playing in our prize-winning tournaments, it's best to grab a seat in here.
• Portland - One of our casual gaming halls, with the music playing (like 'Hall 1' at the old venue)
• Pendeen - Another casual gaming hall, but without the music and a smaller room.
• Clan Rooms - Our smaller private rooms for clans/communities, but you can only sit here if you have the appropriate ticket.

Don't forget, you can save £10 on your ticket if you book before the end of September, so what are you waiting for, book now!

With a new venue comes a new game for our tournament series at epic.TEN. It's time to put CSS to bed and welcome the latest incarnation, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive to our events with a potential prize fund of £3000!

We've supported CSS for the last two years, but having seen numbers decline over more recent events, it's important for us to move with the times and look forward to hosting what's likely to be one of the biggest competitive FPS titles in the current scene.

Full details of the tournament will be made available closer to the time, but for now check out our Counter-Strike: Global Offensive Tournament pages for more details. If you're in a CSGO team, then make sure you book before the end of September to take advantage of £10 off the next event!

Grab your diaries, as we can now pretty much confirm the 2013 LAN dates for the year. The only date we're slightly unsure of is whether there will be an October main LAN event, and before we decide on this, we need to see how the numbers go for epic.TEN in the new venue and then see if it is viable, as previous October events have been fairly quiet.

Event Dates

• epic.TEN | 15-18th February 2013 | Kettering Conference Centre (400 Players)
• epic.lite 9 | 24-27th May 2013 (Spring Bank Holiday) | Moorlands Village Hall (32 Players)
• epic.ELEVEN | 25-28th July 2013 | Kettering Conference Centre (400 Players)
• epic.lite 10 | 27-29th September 2013 | Moorlands Village Hall (32 Players)
• epic.lite 11 | 6-8th December 2013 | Moorlands Village Hall (32 Players)

Bookings for epic.TEN are now open with a discount of £10 if you book before the end of September, other event bookings will open in 2013.

After some fantastic support from the Call of Duty 4 community at our last two events, fielding over 20 teams each time, we're very pleased to confirm our continued support for COD4 at epic.TEN.

Details about our Call of Duty 4 tournament are now available including revised prize triggers. As always, prize money will be paid out immediately.

If you're looking for a team to participate with, then head over to ptER's Tek-9 thread of awesome to speak to the other COD4 community members attending.

So that's the first of our tournament announcements for our new venue, more coming soon!

As you've probably seen, we're expanding for epic.TEN as we move to our new venue at the Kettering Conference Centre. That means we're going to need a bigger team to continue offering our great, fun, LAN parties.

Staffing a LAN is very hard work, and it's a tiring weekend, but seeing all of the hard work pay off, and everybody enjoying themselves is extremely rewarding. Everyone at epic.LAN is a volunteer, right up to the management team, so we're all staffing the events because we enjoy it.

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We know the wait has been almost as long as it was for Duke Nukem: Forever, but we can assure you that it won't be anywhere near as disappointing!

The team has been working away getting our new forums ready, using the IPB platform, and we plan to go live this Wednesday 15th August. One of the things that's taken us some time is to ensure that we bring over all of the content from the old forums, so we don't lose our history. The only thing we haven't been able to migrate is the PM system, so make sure you've saved any PMs you want to keep.

The current forums will go offline around 6pm on the Wednesday and we aim to bring the new ones online around 9/10pm. Naturally there may be some teething problems when we go live, despite all of our testing, so please do bear with us!

We can't wait to bring you the new forums and all the new features they will bring!

The guys over at bit-tech put on their first ever pub quiz last week in London and in true freebie-ninja style, Inferno arranged for a contingent of us to attend. It was insanely difficult - I'm sure we could set the epic.QUIZ to "Expert" and still not be as hard!! After plugging through the inital rounds (of beer) we managed to pull ahead of the pack, thanks mainly to Inferno's logo knowledge, establishing ourselves as targets. It was going great until the, now infamous, "retro-tech" round in which we managed 2/10 and thought we really had lost our place on the podium. Only JoeShow's knowledge of game maps and my knowledge of TLAs in the final rounds clinched us the victory (with a hefty dose of luck!).

It was a brilliant night and we just wanted to say a big thanks to Corsair for supplying the prizes (Corsair Vengeance 2000 headset, Corsair K60 keyboard and Corsair M60 mouse) and to bit-tech for organising the evening in addition to providing a celebratory cheesecake and golden trophy!

Next time they put on a quiz, we'll let you know. Hopefully we can field a couple of teams and besides, it gives us a good excuse to drink on a school night!

(L-R: JoeShow, Inferno, Saboo, Flash)

After dropping to the lower bracket following their earlier loss to Rasta.Xd, Team CRG fought off FM TOXIC to face Rasta.Xd once again in the Grand Final in what proved to be an epic rematch.

For much of the LAN, it looked like the tournament was Rasta's for the taking, having only lost one map throughout the tournament. But a tense battle ultimately delivered Team CRG their first epic.LAN win with Rasta.Xd once again taking 2nd place and their 5th podium finish at our events.

You can read an in-depth report of Team CRGs path to the final over at Cadred. And you can also download the demos now to watch the action back.

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