>>53258812I’m not sure about anywhere else, but Regionals and Nationals were always free in Victoria when my friends and I played in the first half of the 2010s. The only time we had to pay anything was for weekend locals, but often those were partnered with local game stores that Nintendo Australia and NZ and EB collaborated with and it never felt too pricey. E.g. entrance fee was about AUD$15 to AUD $20 for the day, and if you wanted to but extra products like TCG packs you’d get some neat discounts every now and then.
Thinking back on it, I think another reason we stopped playing (aside from jobs and uni studies) was because we found the community being quite toxic. E.g. at the 2014 Aus Nationals, my friend made top-cut with a Mega Charizard X that had Steel Wing (I think his article might still be on NuggetBridge’s archives). Despite my other friends and I thinking it was very smart of him to do that, he got a lot of hate online and in-persob from other players for being an ‘upstart’ and quite a bit of verbal hate at the 2015 Regionals and Nationals. A similar thing happened to me at the 2015 Nationals when I won all my matches and made the Monday Master’s Top Cut, but I had to drop-out as I had two uni exams the next day that I wanted to do some final studying for. A lot of the responses I got from other players on doing that was practically “good riddance”. I hope it’s improved since I stopped as I imagine quite a lot of those players would have had to stop as well, but as I’m not in those communities anymore I couldn’t say for sure.
