Otherwise, there'd be a lot of really cross fit people out there.
<crickets>
Serious, SERIOUS :side-eye:
;P
[This post has been removed]
Remember: Politics are not allowed on the boards; and ill-wishing anyone is really not cool.
Roderick Robertson Forum Coordinator Gen Con, LLC.
I'm coming from Australia with my son. Airline tickets paid and accommodation booked. This is what I said I wanted for my 50th birthday. I've also never been to the U.S. before so we're both really excited to see your amazing country (would love to see a NFL game but I think we're coming at the wrong time). I've even been studying up on tipping- something we don't really have much of over here. I really hope Gen Con goes ahead but totally understand if they cancel it. Not sure what I'll do instead- maybe take 2 weeks off and try to finish Gloomhaven?!
Tipping is done really whether or not the service was any good :/ Horrible service might not get a tip, 'meh' service maybe 10%, reasonable to good will get 20% these days. Sounds weird, but it's largely because we don't pay servers livable wages without tips. Restaurant owners as a group have decided that customers should be outright paying their staff, rather than the employer paying them their full salary. And the servers have no real power in the relationship, so...we tip :)
Hope you avoided the fires, and hope you get to come to Gen Con.
GAMA has said several exhibitors cancelled on attending their Reno show. It's still going forward though so far.
https://www.gama.org/news/492165/Current-status-of-Coronavirus-and-GAMA-Expo.htm
Also the GAMA press release states that 7 out of 190 exhibitors have cancelled, 0.037%
Uh, that's 3.7%. Still not a huge amount, but much larger than the statistically insignificant amount it seems from your post.
Regarding Wizards... I don't know, it seems like Hasbro has been pulling back from conventions and trade shows for quite some time well before Convid-19.
IMO, I'm optimistic about GC still for a few reasons. One is the speed at which things are happening right now. People are moving fast to cancel spring events. And the faster people move now, the better off events in late summer are. The entire landscape of big events has changed significantly even since this thread began. And SARS-CoV-2 is not an extinction level event--it's only going to get so bad. And at the speed things are developing, that implies a good chance that we'll reach the nadir sooner rather than later. And from 'only so bad', there's only up.
People are canceling events not because the disease is massively deadly. They are canceling in order to try to stop it from spreading. So what are the possibilities by July:
1) There are still significant places where the disease has not spread and a reasonable chance of stopping it from getting there. 2) There are places it has not spread, but no reasonable chance of stopping it from getting there. 3) It has pretty much spread everywhere.
At the rate it's going, I see 2 and 3 as far more likely than 1. By July, it'll either more or less be everywhere already, or we'll have thrown up our collective hands at trying to stop it from getting everywhere. And in fact, the CDC has already moved from solely 'Containment' to 'Containment and Mitigation'...and will likely be moving more towards Mitigation and away from bothering with containment attempts moving forward.
If 1 was the case in July, canceling big events in July would make sense (like it does now, when containment still is worth the effort). But it'll most likely be 2 or 3 by then. And at that point, canceling makes much less sense.
for those of us running events, the cost of a cancelled convention is a lot higher. A ton of effort goes into the Nascrag games. Writing and drawing and playtests and buying/building props, printing handouts. Don't take this the wrong way. This is fun! And yeah we could probably sit on what we have for a year. But that would be a year without Playtests and writing and drawing. That would suck. And once you get to a certain age you realize that your number of potential Gen Cons is finite.
I know we are a few months away, but this caught my attention
https://www.statesman.com/business/20200306/sxsw-canceled-over-coronavirus-fears