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[p]Well hi guys i want to include some blogging to give you an insight into how events work in Australia and some of the dynamics involved.[/p][p]One of the hardest things with Australian events is the cost, it costs tens of thousands of dollars to put on a proper event and it takes a stand out performance from Australias event sponsors to make them happen. Ill give you a bit of a breakdown on just how much an event costs to operate.[/p][p]Before we skip to that ill offer this up, why online qualifiers for a lan event? Australia is a big country and teams arent city based. If every team was city based and not player skill based every event would be lan qualified. Its affordable that way as teams just rock up to the local lan centre to qualify. There is a downside to that too, if the best 8 teams in the country are in NSW and QLD then you can garuantee 4 of them arent attending the finals in the place of teams they could beat from other states.[/p][p]Okay so event costs, the first one is the venue which is often the biggest non prize expense. Depending on your options this ranges from $500 a day to $12,000 a weekend depending on how much funding you have for your event. Choosing a venue is very important but sometimes you have few choices as your partners may mandate a host city. [/p][p]Most of you wouldnt even think of this one but the next one is printing, while you probably dont even notice it is there all those retractable banners and posters are expensive, with the retractable banners being between $200-$500 each and a simple set of 5 posters to go on the walls costing almost $500. If you want to do a properly branded venue you can expect to spend around $2000-$5000 on branding materials. Something to keep an eye on guys is that if your at a venue and you identify a sponsor take the time to say hi and tell them how good their banners look. If you want more events you need to support them and directly giving feedback to sponsors will warm their heart to the community and encourage further investment.[/p][p]Staffing costs, while its nice to have volunteers help you get great results blending hired hands and volunteers is important, the downside here is your flying in staff from allover the region not just Australia to make this happen and the staffing costs alone can run into the thousands of dollars. Make sure you thank the staff at the event for what they have put on for you, each event i run i personally put in at least 50 man hours of planning documentation and marketing to make them happen, while most staff wont do quite that much as they have separate areas to manage they put in close to that amount and in the end they are there doing it for you.[/p][p]Those are the 3 core elements to events and what is spent on them, to date i can tell you with a certainty that of the event costs 65% or more goes into either flying you guys in or the prize pool, thats the challenges we face and thats why its so integral that you spend some of your time supporting the event, it can be prediction threads or just taking a minute to post something in all the discussions, sponsors power events.[/p][p]This will be the last note but its a very important one, one thing that is a really big problem in Australian gaming is support, with an example that most of you reading this will identify we recently ran an event where 90% of the content and discussion created for the event was posted or discussed outside of the events website. To make it worse it was 97% if you subtracted the content provided by the staff. While the discussion was still good enthusiastic and supportive unless its done at the home of the event it represents $0 value when giving return to the sponsor so by discussing an event outside an event website your attributing to nothing more than ensuring your particular game drops down if not off the list of games that will get event support.[/p][p]Some people ask me why do i spend all the time doing this, the answer is simple its sitting in spectator watching a great game or walking around a venue seeing the intensity on your face as you compete. As you all will probably chuckle about your as likely to be abusive to me as thankfull for the work me and my colleagues do to make these events happen, we arent doing it for money we are doing it to see you rewarded for the hours of time you put in to be the team at the event.
Tal[/p]