[MR] Event Bids and Driving Distances

[Alan MacNeill]

There are upsides and downsides to having "permanent central sites"

Ups:
- You always know where the event is, so planning is consistent
- A Central location means (presumably) noone in the Kingdom has more
than a ~5 hour drive to the site, or at least relatively few do.
- Potential for negotiated site improvements since we're there all the time
- Potential for friendly price negotiations/access terms, since we're
talking about using a site a lot.

Downsides:
- You're now at the mercy of said site owner.  Crusades died, at least
in part, because the site owner realized he had a potential cash cow
on his hands, and milked it past dry.  People weren't willing to pay
$25 for a daytrip event.

- Unless you live near the PCS, you are never not going to have a
significant drive.  With regional rotation, you trade the occasional
10 hour drive to Crown for the occasional 30 minute drive.  It
averages out about the same.

- Burnout for members of the local group.  Even if the Kingdom tries
to farm out autocratting, there is still going to be a demand on the
local group for site setup and teardown ("I can't stay and help, I
have a 5 hour drive"), crash space accomodation, event staffing, etc.
As a member of a Central group that hosts a large permanently located
event every year, it is a *MAJOR* drain on our Barony's populace every
year.  Yes, we do it and do it joyfully, but we also know that every
year from March through June, all Baronial matters are either Sapphire
Prep, Sapphire Survival, or Sapphire Post-Mortem.  I don't think we
would be able to handle being the host for both an annual Sapphire
Joust, an annual Crown Tournament/Coronation, and an annual Unevent.
Our people would burn out.  I doubt Windmaster's Hill's populace is
all that much more burnout-resistant than ours is (and since our two
Baronies are the geographic center of the Kingdom...)

- Event staleness.  If you have the same event at the same place year
in and year out, eventually the event stagnates into the same event
with the same activities.  admittedly, Crown is pretty much always
going to be the same event with the same activities (that's kinda the
definition of the beast), but the frills around the edges make things
just different enough to make them unique.

Atlantia is a Kingdom with a potential for 12 hour event drives for
some of the populace (someone in the Northwestern tip of MD travelling
to our Georgian outpost).  It is not fair to those groups that live on
the borders to tell them "All Major events are going to be in the
middle of the Kingdom, get your AAA membership ready".

On 6/6/08, The Sheltons <sheltons at sysmatrix.net> wrote:
> I would LOVE to see Atlantia look for some permanent central sites.