MA was announced

[Alex]

You'll notice that we no longer take over the picnic area for registration. We have a picnic on Saturday in which we do some of that stuff, but on Sunday morning we have official tables in the Esplanade from which to do sign-in.

The only reason sign-in was done from the picnic area last time was because the event people had not set up the Esplanade tables in time.

The long and the short of it is that the (very expensive) venue rental is the toll we have to pay to make sure that we won't get shut down during the game.

There are a half-dozen alternatives to renting Festival Arena for the awards ceremony (including, as we've considered, not having one at all and just mailing out prizes) but they're all pointless if the end result is that the game doesn't happen at all.