Despite how good you may believe you are online, it is difficult to flawlessly transition from online to LAN play without knowing how to do so. In this article, I will discuss the preparation required to achieve consistency in a LAN setting. This includes optimizing settings and making sure that your LAN setup mirrors your home setup as close as possible.
Physical Preparation
Preparation for LAN includes everything about your setup and your settings. When it comes to LAN, consistency is crucial. Most inexperienced players do not even realize how comfortable they are at home until they attend their first LAN. This is because most players do not realize that there are many variables that can change the appearance and feel of your game. Below I will outline some of the most important settings that you should have memorized (or written down) before attending a LAN. This way, you can be absolutely certain that your CS appearance at LAN will be just like your CS appearance at home.
Settings
Windows Settings
Anti-aliasing
Anisotropic filtering
Image settings
Vertical sync
Digital vibrance
Brightness
Contrast
Gamma
Monitor refresh rate
Mouse sensitivity
Most of these settings are crucial in replicating your Counter-Strike settings on another computer. However, some computers (and monitors) may have different values and ranges for brightness and gamma (as well as some other settings). Therefore, it’s important to discover how you prefer your settings – go into a server and see how dark the darkest spot of a map is and how bright the brightest spot of a map is in order to help gauge this. Also, be aware of what each of the settings do to your monitor as well as your game. Although I won’t go into detail about what each of these settings do and how they affect your game, a simple GotFrag search will answer most of your questions about these settings.
Other Settings
Launch option commands
Sensitivity
Zoom_sensitivity_ratio
Brightness
Gamma
Resolution
When it comes to Counter-Strike, consistency is absolutely necessary. While some players may switch around a setting or two, most great players tend not to change their settings too often. The launch option commands (inserted in the target box e.g noforce commands) are some of the most important, yet overlooked when it comes to attending a LAN. Also, even though all your settings may mirror your home settings exactly, the "feel" of LAN can be completely different – this is natural for most people attending their first tournament. I recommend gauging your sensitivity by how many turns you can do while dragging your mouse from one side of your mouse pad to the other. Make sure you do it before you go to the LAN, and then do it there as well! That way you will be able to get a much more accurate measurement of your sensitivity and you will know whether you need to lower or raise it slightly.
Your setup at a LAN can dramatically alter your play. By setup, I am referring to your chair, keyboard, mouse, mouse pad, monitor, body, and headphones positioning. Watching some of the major tournament videos should give you plenty of examples of how professional players will recreate their home setup on LAN. Some players make sure that they have their exact chair height that they do at home (i.e. stacking chairs). Although most professional players realize the importance of keeping your setup consistent, most new LAN players do not. However, I greatly recommend that you copy your exact home setup despite how unusual it may look to other people (hey, you may even start a new trend!).
Using a different setup than the one you use at home will be detrimental to your performance, as you will not feel completely comfortable and you will not feel in your element. For example, I had been notorious for forgetting my mouse pad at home. Although people were kind enough to let me borrow their mouse pad, which was exactly like mine, the ‘feel’ of my movement felt different because pads go through different stages of wear. Counter-Strike is a game of mind over matter so I didn’t let it get to me, but I wonder how well I would have done if I had my entire setup recreated.
Tips to recreate your home setup on LAN:
- Make your setup exactly like your home setup.
- Pay attention to the distances between your peripherals, i.e. how many inches is it from the corner of your keyboard to the corner of your mouse pad?
- Discover how you feel most comfortable at home playing and follow it on LAN. Maybe you need to take your shoes off or cross your legs? Also make sure your feet are positioned how you position them at home.
- Make sure your peripherals all line up like they do at home. Use guiding points. For example, the left edge of my monitor is directly above the left edge of my F4 button.
- Realize how you position your body in front of your monitor – are you directly in front of your monitor or off to one side?
Using these tips you should be able to adapt from online to LAN play a lot more easily. I cannot reiterate enough that consistency is an absolute necessity in adapting from online to LAN play. It is a common misconception to believe that you will be able to attend a LAN and ‘prove yourself’ without first being educated on which settings are most important to check before going to a tournament. In this article, I hope you gained some insight into the professional Counter-Strike scene and realize that performing well on LAN is not as easy as many people believe it is. This is mostly because they do not realize how important some settings are in recreating your setup or they don’t even know which settings are different. Using the knowledge from this article combined with my previous one, you should be both mentally and physically prepared to perform well on LAN.