As you all know, exactly one week ago MLG announced that the MLG Winter Arena only will be available by Pay per view. I first reacted with a scream trying to believe what I've just read. After calming down and starting to think and analyze it, I came to the conclusion that it was a bold move that would cause MLG a lot of bad will. The general discussion rapidly turned into either a discussion about the pricing of the PPV or that the Gold members felt they got screwed.I think that the discussion about the pricing was a bit over the top. Yes it is a high pricing compared to a lot of other eSport related products like HD passes but for me it's all about the resistance wall you create by "forcing" people to pay. The biggest obstacle is that the customer will have to consider if they want it or not which automatically will scare off most people, on top of that it's always a hassle to pay for something over the net.For the Gold members sake I completely understand them. MLG have been pushing them around and I can understand that the already paying customers felt screwed even though it was a completely new product. Would they have been upset if MLG started broadcast with the intensity of GSL? Maybe, but probably not!As I said the biggest problem wasn't the actual PPV but more the role that MLG took with acting like a victim and begging for community support. That role got even more highlighted when Sundance appeared on Live on Three I interpreted it like people had to support MLG to make sure eSports would survive, that it was not such a big deal with $20 and that they had made wrong but wouldn't change their minds but they needed the support.This is my take on it; if you have spent $56 million over 5.5 years and then are begging for $20 from each supporter to save your company then you are not worth sticking around. I understand that errors have been made and dealt with inside MLG and misjudgments and financial crisis have occurred but still?Is MLG too big to fail that eSports can't survive without it? I don't think so, as we over the last 13 years that eSport have been around, we have seen the fall of even greater organizations like the CPL, CGS and WSVG. That's the nature of the market, survival of the fittest. I do hope that MLG will have many more years to come; to me they ran the best SC2 tournaments of 2011 even though being in the big red.The other part that partly made me laugh and partly felt that MLG are playing their "support us for the sake of eSport" card, is the referral program. They more or less bought free advertisement slots at the sites/channels and their strategy must have been "you need us more than we need you, with out MLG you're screwed , so help us out!". To me it was a disgrace when the team that I have respected the most over the last couple of years wrote this "Roughly the same price as large pizza, rental movie and a few drinks. While paying for this PPV event you'll also be supporting the future events that MLG host, teams, players and communities involved.", for me it's unbelievable that Team Dignitas supported this and used those words.Okay, so PPV was a bold move, which I personally don't believe in, screwing the Gold members was dumb but they tried to correct it with giving them a discount. Using the referral program and begging for the community support was most likely very smart and will without any cost generate a lot of more sold PPV passes.So why are MLG dumb? Well my first point is that it's unbelievable that they are having the MLG Winter Arena at their office so that they can't have a live audience or any journalists on location. Sundance explain the situation, that it was not planned and further Arenas will have a much better venue.It might be added, that Sundance also stated that if they don't sell enough PPV passes there might not be anymore MLG Arenas. In my conspiratorial mind it says;a) That they are trying to threaten the communityb) They are really low on cash and must be able to show investor a sign of revenue increase without extra costs to further get investments.Who knows how the economic situation is within MLG, the only thing I know is that they have stopped getting liquidity from investors and instead have been borrowing money which generates a draining interest rate.Back to the topic about spectators and journalists.The best part of MLG 2011 was all the fans at each event and all the exposure worldwide that the competition generated. Tons of new eSport journalists were born and interviews with all the players got pumped out all over the web. It was the perfect place for fans to meet their favorite players, see them in real life and get their autograph and maybe a short conversation. With the MLG Winter Arena all this is gone but still MLG is flying 32 players, all expenses paid, to New York, I don't get it at all.On top of that and something that came to my attention today is that all eSports site from around the world will not be granted press passes to even watch the event. I have contacted all the big sites like Team Liquid, GosuGamers, ESFI-World, SK-Gaming, Fnatic and many more. Some of them have not requested press passes while others have been rejected.Yeah, sure you can say that the sites should be able to pay $20 and you are right. But it's all very interesting and completely dumb! The journalists who generate tons of attention, traffic and exposure are first of all not welcomed to the venue and second of all not encouraged to cover the event by watching it on stream. I don't know how the system is created but let's say that each individual needs a pass then it would be $60 for a site, who most likely doesn't even pay their staff to write, to have three editors cover it over a weekend.To me this is totally unbelievable and another part that the MLG organization is totally off when making decisions. An hour to hour coverage would make MLG tons of money in PPV revenues, if a site would constantly update their readers of the actions at the event. "Next match coming up MVP vs NaNiwa, can the Swede make do it again?" etc. Where other organizations pay the flights and accommodations for journalists to cover their event, MLG gives the finger.I will most likely watch MLG this weekend, if I don't get fed up by StarCraft II after watching Assembly. Hopefully there will be a glitch in the MLG stream system like it has been previous years. If the tournament will be covered or not by Rakaka is not yet decided, on our last meeting before having this information we decided to cover it all in as it's totally six Swedes at the event.On a side note, it would be hilarious if, for example, TeamLiquid didn't cover the event because of not having access to the venue or the stream, where the hell would you as a reader find the results of the tournament? On the broken www.majorleaguegaming.com? Most likely the tournament would pass the whole community without many taking notice.I ask myself, does MLG even want anyone to see the event? And how many will actually buy the PPV pass? One thing is for sure, the numbers for MLGs PPV will only decrease over the year if there would be another PPV Arena to come.Thanks to Iceman for doing his best to get this wall of text into some kind of understandable english. I will most likely stick to my mother tongue in the future!