The same one who spent the first hour or two of each LAN trying to convince each of their friends to stop playing random shit / playing by themselves while everyone is copying the game we were going to play in order to try and prevent finally getting to the last person and the first half of the people being "over it and wanting to play something else" only for the cycle to re-start.
Also the same one threatening all of the friends leeching random shit from each other that if they don't wait until at least most people have copied the game that they'll receive physical harm.
Also the same one that loves the bittorrent protocol almost as much for non internet reasons as they do for internet reasons. Hosting all the games we were going to play on a local tracker/seedbox at a LAN absolutely fucking changed the game entirely. That and getting a layer 3 switch and tagging/prioritizing torrent traffic over everything else.
I actually missed out on LAN parties because no friends and parents didn't get the internet until I was almost out of the house so idk if this is a dumb question but is there a benefit of usinga personal seedbox over something like a network drive to share the game files?
It probably depends on what hardware you have access to. I feel like a nas with an ssd, and a 10 gig uplink would be much better. Then you could serve everyone files right from the server, and simplify things. You could use something like lancache and users wouldn't notice any difference. Go to steam (or wherever) and download, same as normal.
But if you only have a 1 gig switch (or the nas only has hard drives), you'd be splitting 1 gig from the server across all clients. If the clients can share files (and have unused bandwidth) then they can download and share with each other. Now instead of sharing 1 gigibit connection to the server, there are other connections they can make between the clients. Instead of 10 users getting 100mbps from the server, they can get 100mbps from the server, and 400mbps~ from other clients (and sharing 400mbps~ to other clients).