I've been seeing so many people shit on tournaments that are reopening, and honestly it's the most childish and Smasher thing to do. I personally believe that remaining closed is the correct thing to do until this blows over, but not every business has that luxury (thread):

For context, I am a 27-year-old statistics/business strategy graduate who ran tournaments and did consulting work on the side for LAN King Gaming until coming on full-time after I lost my data science job due to COVID. I'm married and have a one-year-old daughter I provide for.

All that to say that I'm a bit older/in a different place in life than your average Smasher, and so I feel like I'm in a bit better of a place to understand where a lot of these stores putting on events are coming from, and also have more insight into how these businesses work.

Many people who own and run these stores where tournaments take place are likely to have a family to provide for, which again is not something that most Smash players need to worry or think about in any degree.

So. the world shut down for four months, from March through June. A lot of the places that put on Smash tournaments are: card shops, hourly play gaming stores (like LAN King), and businesses like that. Entirely dependent upon extended-stay foot traffic.

They (we) are in a unique place to get absolutely bent over backwards by COVID. Can't come into the store? You have no revenue. Same as many theaters, zoos, theme parks, etc. These businesses shut down along with every other store in the US, except they had no way to make money.

In some states, you had access to some type of rent forgiveness for a certain amount of time if you qualified for it (and they were not quick in processing those requests), and some interest-free payroll loans. For LAN King, we qualified for the loans but not the rent credit.

To recap, not every business has been able to take advantage of all of the COVID relief programs that were supposed to be provided to them, for a myriad of reasons. Most small stores don't keep enough capital to just eat their fixed costs for 4+ months, so they're hurting.

We at LAN King are in a specifically good situation, having negotiated for an extremely good rental rate prior to opening the business, and we had a decent amount of cash on hand at the beginning of COVID, but even that runs out eventually. I consider us to be pretty fortunate.

But imagine, if you will, someone who is in our situation but whose rental rate was a bit higher month to month, and had no access to payroll loans or rent forgiveness. It's not like they have money to take their landlord to court, they're hemorrhaging cash as it is.

And here's the other kicker- as soon as any state opens up for business, the government axes any type of help these businesses may have had access to before, even if nobody comes to their store still because most people are responsibly trying to social distance (as they should).

If you started a business that happened to be vulnerable to COVID, and your entire livelihood/well-being of you and your family hinged on getting people back into your store, I think more of you than you'd care to admit would open up too. HAVE SOME GODDAMN EMPATHY.

Now I know that this doesn't apply to every Smash local, many are put on by non-business entities. I ran a local for about two years this way before partnering with LAN King, and now I'm on the opposite side. I don't think these locals have any reason to exist right now.

If you ask me, I personally believe it's morally incorrect to expose yourself needlessly while cases are still on the rise. But not everyone is so economically insulated from the fallout of this recession to have the privilege of making that choice.

I believe that on average, the people/businesses who are putting on these tournaments are struggling, and struggling hard. Running tournaments/events in the middle of COVID was probably not their first, second, or sixth choice. But they're running low on options.

"Just run an online tournament instead!" Unless you benefit in a huge way from Twitch viewership, online tournaments are a massive waste of time that normally no one wants to pay for. We ran them here for about 1.5 months and lost money on them every week.

The only entities who can make that work are established businesses such as VGBC and Smash personalities, who have been able to monetize streaming. Not everyone has the luxury of being someone who makes people want to sub to them, or generate big followings to make money off ads.

So if you're not generating money off of online events in those two ways, there are too many free-to-play tournaments happening every day to generate demand/traction for a paid one. And tbh I felt like a scumbag charging entry for an experience centered around Ultimate online.

And so, in desperation, these stores try to drive traffic with a Smash tournament or other event, only to get unequivocally shit on by a bunch of people with the emotional intelligence of a 12-year-old who can't or refuses to understand what's actually going on behind the scenes.

Here's the point: Making the decision for a store/tournaments to open up or remain closed is not as black and white of an issue as many people make it out to be. Even if it's not an "essential business," it's probably pretty essential to the owner/people who work there.

The people who are wanting to blacklist businesses/TOs who are starting up locals again are, I'd wager, quite comfortable in quarantine, which is again a PRIVILEGE. Not everyone can afford to wait indefinitely for the world to go back to normal, as much as we'd like to.

Especially in the US where relief programs were already scant and are rapidly disappearing as the country opens up many people don't have much of a choice.

Again, this isn't to say that there aren't people who're irresponsibly reopening locals, I'd be surprised actually if there weren't. But before people with large/impressionable followings want to make huge sweeping statements about how terrible these people/businesses are, think.

Does this local take place at a business that probably was hit pretty hard by COVID? What do I gain by publicly calling out someone for trying to scrape by in a recession, especially if they're doing their best to be responsible about opening up?

I'm not advocating for people to start going to locals. But I hope you may think twice about who you're demonizing on the other side next time you see a post about a local. They're probably just trying to make it through this quarantine, same as you. I know I am.

Long post, but this is a much more nuanced issue than a lot of people like to think it is. Hopefully there was interesting info in there for you.