Well, as a teenager with no boundaries, and a dangerous interest in network security, I wasn't going to let this stand.
The issue was obvious once I opened Wireshark, and saw the amount of traffic coming to my machine - see, they mostly relied on donated equipment, which happened to be 24-port *hubs*. If you don't know what that means, it means that everyone's traffic was going to everyone, and network cards were just giving up under the load.
For next year, we bought a couple small unmanaged switches. Had to keep the hubs, but they were connected to switches, so we didn't have any more packet storms.
I eventually added pfSense with a captive portal, where you'd get a voucher with your ticket, so we could connect MAC addresses to people. Used it twice, both times to tell people to stop torrenting shit.
I never got to use it because it shut down before it was done, but I wrote some software that listened for Torrent peer exchange broadcasts, requested the metadata, and then proceeded to read it out over the speaker, like "Seat 4A is currently downloading Godfather-2005-XviD, shame on them!" to let people know who to complain to if the network got bogged down, lol
Another thing was clear from Wireshark - the issue was that someone was torrenting something, and I had their MAC address.
At this point, I flagged down one of the staff, and explained the issue quickly. A quick discussion between them later, and I was given permission to knock them offline (I did some ARP poisoning) and an offer to join up as the "networking guy", which I accepted.