Hat wrote:
I'll let Mary respond to your specific question, but it seemed a good time to bring up a related point. Drive time isn't travel time. Drive time is ideal conditions on the roads with no stops. It does not account for weather, traffic, construction, etc. For us Minneapolis is an 11 hour drive. Detroit is 4. When we drove back from Alpharetta Georgia to Cincinnati in June, drive time was theoretically 6:46 minutes. It took 10.5 hours with stops, traffic, etc to get back. For reference we drove on a Sunday with no significant periods of rain.
One of our considerations is can we make it to wherever it is after work and get in by around midnight. Doing a quick look at flights, flying out of Dayton for a Friday night and flying back Sunday, ticket prices $548 / person. Best price if we're completely flexible in terms of schedule and layovers is $426 / person and there'd be 2 of us.
I agree. Drive time is definitely not travel time but travel time is highly variable (both by person and by current conditions). Minneapolis -> Chicago for me is anywhere from 7.5 to 9.5 hours travel time almost entirely depending on traffic in Chicago when I get near.
Hat wrote:
If it's in Minneapolis, I can pretty much guarantee we won't be there. As I said, if there are enough people who can attend up that way in the 70 - 80+ range it may still be a good choice for the con.
Personally, I think it would be better, if feasible, to move ArcaniCon around each year so it is not always the same players that are always to attend. However, location would be restricted from a practical perspective to where enough players would attend. I think there would be enough players if it was moved further west in the mid-west (Chicago, Des Moines, Minneapolis, etc) but I don't have the data to know for sure (and I doubt PCI has it right now either without running a poll or something similar). I think it could work in some locations in Canada as well based on the number of vocal Canadian players (I'm assuming there are more that are not vocal on the forums) but I don't know.