The Finals were approaching, and major news outlets and online platforms were whipping up a frenzy. Tourists from across the country poured toward San Andreas, the West Coast's sprawling metropolis.
Even for a metropolis whose economy ranked second only to New York's in the Federation—and second in the world—San Andreas had rarely seen such a spectacle.
By the day before the Finals began, the city streets were packed and the Hotels were full, despite room rates having climbed to several times their usual price.
The Rising Star Tournament had given San Andreas an enormous short-term economic boost, one that would show up in the city's future quarterly reports. Preliminary estimates suggested that revenue from hotels and tourism alone could be several times higher than in the same quarter of previous years.
As the organizer, Vought International was making a fortune.
According to official ticket prices for the Finals, even the cheapest seats in the general sections cost over a thousand dollars each. Floor seats easily topped ten thousand.
In the prime floor seating area, a single ticket reportedly cost between three hundred and five hundred thousand dollars.
It was an absurd sum. Watching a match from the best seats would cost an ordinary Federation citizen five to ten years' wages.
But as the saying went, the world had no shortage of rich people.
When tickets for the Finals' elimination rounds went on sale, they sold out within hours. Vought International's open-air Competition Venue, built specifically for the Finals, had a full hundred thousand seats. A rough calculation based on official sales alone put the company's ticket revenue for a single day of matches at hundreds of millions of dollars.
And that was only the most conservative estimate. Many tourists desperate to watch had failed to get tickets. Where there was