We are very pleased to announce that Thermaltake's gaming division, Tt eSPORTS will be sponsoring the epic.FIVE LAN Party this February!

Thanks to their support, we will have the following goodies available as prizes for various activities during the LAN:

• 3 x Challenger Gaming Keyboard
• 3 x Azurues Mice
• 3 x Dasher Mouse Pad

42 spaces are remaining for epic.FIVE, with 158 currently confirmed and spaces going extremely quickly. We predict that the event is well on track to sell out and be the biggest and best epic.LAN so far!

About Tt eSPORTS

Thermaltake has been a well-known brand in the gaming & DIY market for PC Chassis, Coolers and Power Supplies PSU for many years. The brand personality of unique, aggressive, vivid and stylish makes Thermaltake an expert in creating exciting things and fascinating environment for gamers and enthusiasts. Tt eSPORTS inherited the brand personality with unique and creative design by observing users’ behaviours and requirements. The fan cooling design on Tt eSPORTS Challenger keyboard demonstrate the brand spirit. It is the worldwide first keyboard with fan cooling function that could dry your hand sweats and blow tension away during cut-throat competition.

Please be aware that, in line with our cancellation policy, the cancellation deadline for epic.FIVE has now passed. From this point forward we are unable to offer any cancellations unless we reach an event sell-out. If the event does sell-out we will process any cancellation requests in order of receipt (subject to the administration fee), providing that the space can be re-sold to another participant through our system, please note that your tickets are not transferrable directly. If you wish to submit a cancellation request, please contact us.

At this close stage to the event, we have to finally commit a number of items of expenditure, based on the predicted final number of seats sold, hence having to take this approach to cancellations.

One of the biggest competitions at epic.LAN is always our pub quiz on the Saturday evening of the event. Usually attracting the majority of participants, we enjoy a few hours of general nostalgia with a few/many beers after a some tough days of gaming.

Bearing in mind the increased numbers at epic.FIVE, and with our TF2 tournament involving teams of 6, we've decided to allow a slight increase to our pub quiz team sizes, which will now have a 6 player limit. We're not planning on removing the cap entirely as we are still a relatively small LAN, and we dont want one or two giant teams to entirely dominate purely by numbers, so the cap gives everybody a fair chance.

Also, we can give some vague clues now to the rounds for this one, very few changes after the generally positive feedback from our last quiz, but a non-exhaustive list includes:

• Gaming Music
• General Knowledge
• Oldschool Kids TV
• Gaming News
• Film Music
• Current Affairs
• And many more, including our Bonus Rounds!

Some of you may have noticed that today we went over the 200 signup mark for the event, 212 in fact at the time of writing. With our 200 person capacity, that means that the seats will be sold on a first-come-first-served basis. Remember, your seat is only confirmed with a payment for your ticket and we are unable to hold any provisional bookings open.

The eagle-eyed may have also spotted that there are over 200 seats on the plan available. This isn't a mistake! We've made a conscious decision to cap the event at 200 people, even if we were able to sell more spaces. While we'd love the extra people, we feel that it is sensible to grow the event in small steps, keep things manageable and make sure we give you a great quality event for epic.FIVE.

So with pay day fast approaching, make sure you grab your seat now to secure your place at epic.FIVE this February. To clarify - bookings are still open and will continue to be until all seats are paid for.

After each event, we spend a lot of time gathering feedback via the forums, surveys and generally chatting to participants.

We don't just do this for show! We gather your comments so that we can continually improve our events for you!

There are still some final details to confirm for epic.FIVE yet, but we've tried to address some of your comments from the last event (particularly around the bar pricing) and we are now able to let you know what we'll be doing better. The list isn't exhaustive, we've just picked up on some of the key issues from last time.

Sometimes we can't fix everything though, or we already do something which works for the majority, if that's the case, we hope that you appreciate our honesty in telling you so. 

Read on to see how epic.FIVE will be even better than the last...

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In July 2010 at epic.FOUR, we announced that we were going to make some changes to the events in order to secure them in the long term. While we're still a long way off where we need to be for epic.FIVE (and that means we need all of you provisionals to book your places ASAP!), we passed two significant milestones this week.

Firstly, we topped the 100 player mark for epic.FIVE, and secondly when we hit 101 participants that made the event officially the biggest epic.LAN so far!

Thank you to everybody who has supported the event to this point, we look forward to seeing you at Uttoxeter Racecourse in a few weeks for not only the biggest event so far, but we hope to give you the best epic.LAN so far!

With £1000 up for grabs at epic.FIVE, and promises of an even bigger tournament at epic.SIX in July, the Counter-Strike: Source tournament is now really shaping up. A good number of teams have now started to confirm their places, with Rasta.Xd and eMpathy leading the way and many more finalising their arrangements.

Teams interested in attending can find full details of the tournament, including the new rules at www.epiclan.co.uk/epic5/css. The map pool for the tournament will consist of:

• de_contra
• de_dust2
• de_inferno
• de_nuke
• de_train
• de_tuscan

epic.LAN Tournament Manager, Kevin ‘Nivek’ Wilson explained, “We’re aiming for a good, traditional CSS tournament at epic.FIVE, nothing too fancy or controversial, just a high quality event run by a professional team. As always though, we’re running the events for the gaming community and we would value any input beforehand so that we can make sure we operate a LAN to remember for all the right reasons!”

More and more of our participants are looking at ways of managing group bookings. Whether it's a competitive gaming clan, or just a group of friends who want to make sure that they're sat together and leave all of the organisation hassle down to one person in the group, (harsh, but fair).

So to help with these group bookings, we have a number of tools available, including the ability to pay for an entire group all together, sit the group members and then hand out the tickets. Alternatively, everyone can buy individually and then hand the control of the seating to a more responsible member of the group, well...maybe responsible or just have the short straw!

Anyway, the processes are quite self explanatory, but if you need any help, we've produced some handy guides below, or you can ask any member of the team in our IRC channel #epic.LAN on Quakenet.

• Group Bookings
• Picking a Seat
• Seating Manager
• Vouchers (transferring group bookings to the members)

We're very pleased to confirm that GamerFM, the radio for gamers, will be attending epic.FIVE this February as one of our coverage partners.

The team will be presenting live from the event to their online station, giving listeners the news and interviews from epic.FIVE as well as all the latest tunes.

Billy Howard, GamerFM Manager said about the event:

"Gamer.FM are really happy to be working with epic.Lan, providing event coverage, music and also interviews with some big names! If you want to listen to great music and great personalities, tune in to us at http://gamer.fm! A big thanks to everyone at epic.Lan for their support! We look forward to meeting with everyone in February"