If I drove out my 5 hour trip to Chicago only to see that not even half of the guys in Chicago where (it seems) most of them don't live further than 1.5 hours away from the monthly, I probably wouldn't think well of the community either.
And "paying more for a local" doesn't really click either tbh. This doesn't seem like any old local, and it's not in the same location as Big E events either, so it makes sense that it isn't the same price as those. If people didn't want to show up because it's too expensive for them, I think that'd be a fair reason if people said so, but that's not what the case is sounding like right here looking only at those last couple of posts.
They wanted 60 people at the event. They would have done this regardless if we had less than 30 people preregistered.
They want at least 30 people from out-of-the-area.
That's not feasible for this event.
Did they ever say that they wanted 30 people out of area BEFORE the dropped it as a main game? This is the first I'm hearing about this.
For one, that's just not even a good expectation since that isn't even what they get for their other main games. Marvel 3 last year basically only had 2 out of region players, Dual Kevin and Flocker. Even if that's just counting out of area as "not NY", you still don't have nearly that many people from PA/MA who make up the brackets, I just checked. If this was a *big* major, like Final Round or CEO, I could see that being an expectation, but it looks like they only had 170 entrants for SF4 last year. How the hell are they expecting us to get more than 1/3 of the size of their biggest game?
If they are expecting out of region people, like me for example, to come out, stuff like that depends on a bunch of factors, one including is if the community already speaks positively of the event. GUTS4 or CEOtaku don't really seem to be trying to be nearly as big as this (considering this looks like it's trying to be a "Big Major" Major), but the things that our community said about those events makes me want to travel to them. I haven't really heard anything about DTN that makes me want to go out there, and Pot bonuses mean nothing really when they are small. Among other things, it just doesn't sound like they understand/have good perceptions of what matters to smaller scenes like CEOtaku does. And if this is a tournament that doesn't look out well for smaller scenes, then it probably isn't the thing for us.