I don't think I've told the story here on how I ended up managing the network side on a local LAN party. It was a doozy.
So, I was 16 (I think), and me and some friends had booked some spots at a local LAN party, now on its third year. Rented out venue, you could buy snacks, so on.
By midnight, the network started performing really bad, but in a weird way - I got packet loss to my friend sitting right next to me, and I wasn't alone. You could see that people were getting annoyed.
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