Winners

Congratulations to the team lead by pad for winning this year's hunt online! They win 2 tickets for 2011 epic.LAN events and £50 to spend at Kustom.

The Solutions

If you want to keep playing, we'll leave the hunt up for a few weeks yet to see how you get along. But in the mean time, we've produced an answer sheet to explain our twisted thinking on all of the questions.

Feedback

As always, we value your feedback, please let us know what you thought in the discussion thread. Do remember when giving your feedback, that for us as organisers, it's very difficult to predict what anybody is going to do in tackling the questions. We have a logical thought process in place in our minds, but that is often miles away from what people try on the day. Be assured that throughout the entire hunt, the team was watching answers, deciding on appropriate clues (while trying to be fair to teams who already had an advantage from completing the questions) and talking to individuals on teams trying to guide them through, particularly some of the newer players who were trying this for the first time.

You will be glad to know that the total hunt took around the amount of time we intended when we wrote it this year, and while people may have been stuck on one or two questions, they were often balanced out by very quick solutions of others.

We look forward to the next hunt at epic.FIVE!

Yes, in mere hours we'll be releasing our pack of hounds, well clues for the chase around the... ok the analogy isn't really working.

At 6pm Friday 17th December, the teaser questions will be revealed for this year's epic.HUNT Online, followed by the main questions from 12 noon on Saturday.

The top players (number to be determined) will then get a 30 minute head start for the final charge on Sunday, which starts at 12 again for everybody else.

Make sure you have an epic.LAN account and go to the hunt site at hunt.epiclan.co.uk to begin.

Remember, you could be in with the chance of winning 2x epic.LAN tickets to be used at any 2011 event AND £50 to spend over at Kustom PCs.

We're looking to add to the number of live DJ sets at epic.FIVE in Hall 1. DJs Haden & Superchief have entertained the crowds at our last few events, and following their success, we'd like to give more members of the opportunity a chance to spin the virtual decks at our next event.

So if you're interested in giving it a try, then contact us with some information about your style, and perhaps some links to your previous work and we'll consider you for the event timetable.

Signups for the epic.FIVE Team Fortress 2 Tournament are now open on our tournament system.

When you have confirmed your space for epic.FIVE, you will be able to join in with the Team Fortress 2 tournament in one of the following ways:

• Create a New Team
• Join an Existing Team
• Sign Up as a Merc

So if you have a pre-arranged team, create the team, hand out the passwords to your team members and get yourselves signed up.

If you don't have an organised team, but you want to take part anyway, then sign up as a merc, put a comment in the box about your skill/preferred class and we'll help you to get involved in an existing team or mix team to be in with a chance of winning the prize.

Your team must be registered for the tournament by 8pm Thursday 24th February.

This year's online hunt will start at 12 noon on Saturday 18th December for Round 1, the second round will begin at 12 noon on Sunday 19th December and there will be a head start for the first few players to complete round 1.

A series of teaser questions will be available from 6pm Friday 17th December which must be completed before you can access the main questions.

You can now sign up to the hunt as follows:

1. Create or log in to your epic.LAN Account
2. Go to the Hunt Online site using this link which will automatically log you in.
3. Or if you have an epic.LAN account already, you can log in straight away at hunt.epiclan.co.uk using your normal epic.LAN account details.  
4. That's It! You're ready to start playing from 6pm on the 17th. 

Prizes

For the winning person (who may choose to work as part of a team), we can confirm that the prize will be

• 2 Tickets to any 2011 epic.LAN Event
• £50 Kustom Voucher

Congratulations to CyberDrac and Elsie who have both won a key to participate in the Battlefield: Play4Free closed beta after their names were pulled out of my hat. The correct answer was of course Battlefield: Vietnam (none of the entrants got this wrong!).

They're the lucky two that get to join the other thousand (or there abouts) gamers, including a couple of us from epic.TEAM.

The keys are working their way to you via the email address on your epic account! In addition to playing in the closed beta, both CyberDrac and Elsie will be able to feedback to the developers and have their suggestions worked into the final release.

13,608 visitors and 12,754 unique MAC addresses reconfirmed DreamHack Winter 2010 as the world's biggest LAN Party and Digital Festival in the world. The growing attendance also goes to show that increased home internet speeds are not having a negative effect on LAN events around the world, and it's not exactly as though Sweden doesn't have fast domestic internet.

Read more at Winbar's Dreamhack Winter 2010 Review.

See our other coverage at:

• The Dreamhack Diary
• Dreamhack Gallery

To reward those who have signed up and paid for epic.FIVE, you are eligible to compete for one of two available closed beta keys from Battlefield: Play4Free. The closed beta will run from Tuesday 30th November for a number of weeks (yet unspecified) and will provide the opportunity to shape the latest game from EA. Battlefield: Play4Free will be exclusive to the PC market and as such promises to be great!

All you need to do is answer the following Battlefield related question no later than 12:00 (midday) Tuesday 30th November 2010. If you're successful, a member of staff will notify you Tuesday evening by email with a copy of your key.

If you haven't yet signed up to epic.FIVE and wish to participate, just head over to the event page and confirm your place now!

So we've arrived at Dreamhack!

If you want to keep an eye on what we're up to, we'll be blogging, Tweeting, photographing and streaming from the LAN, so you can follow our coverage at:

• The Dreamhack Diary
• epic.LAN Twitter Account
• Dreamhack Gallery
• Webcam Stream

Woohoo!

epic.FIVE has just had a mention on the Official Team Fortress 2 Blog! Great timing too, as the first few teams begin signing up for their place at the LAN in February!

Watch this space too, as we have some more exciting news about the tournament to announce over the coming weeks.

Thanks to the TF2 guys for posting the details! We're looking forward to a great event with our first Team Fortress 2 tournament.