As the boards can clearly tell you, the contests are extremely strenuous. I myself was spending roughly 3 hours each morning nurturing up to 1,000-2000 Aeridini and 500-1000 Ny'vene...

As soon as the front runners have a strong enough lead there's really no point for those outside of the top 5 or 6 to really participate. Taking nurtures as an example, there's a semi-fixed number of egglings and hatchlings for every species that can be nurtured daily. (Varying only if more hatchlings/offspring are added into the game.) It's ALL OR NOTHING, EVERY DAY, or you stand no chance at all of keeping up, let alone winning.


So my suggestion is a way to break up the competition into a daily contest. Categories and the like will remain the same, and the ultimate prizes would stay as well. The difference would be how the points are added up.


Each day (12:00 am to 11:59 pm) the competitions will start.

1st Place receives 5 points
2nd Place receives 4 points
3rd Place receives 3 points
4th Place receives 2 points
5th Place receives 2 points
6th Place receives 1 point
7th Place receives 1 point
8th Place receives 1 point
9th Place receives 1 point
10th Place receives 1 point

So even when someone tops the charts by defeating 10,000 enemies or getting 1000 nurtures in a single day, it will equal out to only 5 points for the competition itself. Once the daily leaderboards are reset, that person's daily score will start back at 0 along with everyone else. This way there won't be any outrageous leads which will give more players a chance to participate with a fair chance of winning.


The daily points that players earn would be added up on a separate leaderboard which holds the main prizes. (for example 3-vis and 2-vis themed pets, if future leaderboards would have the same prizes.)

This would be better in some ways, but I suspect worse in others. Personally it's the whole concept of a leaderboard that bothers me. But at least this would give more people a chance to win at least something.

And I think that the big prize winners would likely be mostly the same folks over and over again. But, might be worth a try.

I mean, in your case, I'd think that if its a thing of same-people-winning-same-boards, then it can be changed to a more accessible achievement board instead of a contest board.

Something like each user has their own goals or ways to rack up points to win for their own use. Like a fixed goal of 75,000 points/19k nurtures/500 released pets can be redeemable for a 3vis pet, or a fixed goal of 2,500 points for a consolation prize, or something. So no player has to compete against another player, but rack up their own points against a fixed goalboard.

The trouble with the leaderboards as they are set up now is that ALL of them are pretty much skewed or weighted towards older active players. Even the Nurture boards are, though not so obviously. Since this is such a small community, that fosters more competition than it does community, and as we have seen in this festival, heavy competition for a rare prize is not always a nice thing between people who are usually friends.

Personally I prefer what Flute just proposed, some kind of points based kind of thing, where you work your way toward a goal by racking up points doing certain things. But that isn't a leaderboard, it's not competition based. Now, if you could do both side by side, that would satisfy those who do like the competitive aspect, but give others an outlet where if thet don't think they can get to the top of the leaderboar,d they can still work toward a goal of earning what they want. I think that would be the best way to do this, personally. It would also take some of the competitive edge off the leaderboards so hopefully people wouldn't be sniping at each other for knocking each other off.


I am also going to assume that the "released pets" part was a way to drain the site of all the unwanted pets. This SHOULD NOT be a permanent solution to this problem, cause it's only going to make the "have/have not" problem even worse. Those who can afford to buy with RL money more stables are just going to start stockpiling cheap pets or breeding them like crazy for the sole purpose of releasing at the next festival event. That's kind of off putting to me, even though that was how i manged to get MY griffi. Even as I was doing it, I was grumbling under my breath. Yeah, I had a lot of extras of my own to release, but I also realized that someone probably spent a good number of hours going through the search engine, buying and releasing all those pets set for 1 gold, up to it looks like 50k. That leaderboard in particular is one that should disappear, and wouldn't be needed if we had the promised NPC that would buy back pets.


In short, I don't like the competitive aspect of the leaderboards, but I know others do. So long as there is SOME OTHER doable outlet that people can work toward for the same goal, I'd be good with keeping some of the leaderboards at least. But this cut throat competition is, I think, detrimental to the community as a whole, and that is why I have spoken up about it. Maybe focus more on something like the Scavenger Hunt or something like that, rather than the leaderboards, I dunno.

Total agreement with you on what will likely happen if the release boards become 'a thing' instead of a rarity, Greenmann. Was already talking to people early into the fest about how this could really backfire on population control if people just start breeding up a storm between fests in anticipation of the release boards coming back each time.. I don't really think that's going to solve things so much as cause the problem to veer in new directions.

If the next festival includes any kind of release reward like this, you can bet people will start hoarding at least the exclusive pets. The others probably not so much, except maybe the Luffox, but the exclusives, especially Nephs, will definitely be hoarded.I'm tempted to do it myself anyway.

We most likely won't do another release contest - at least for awhile. Because of what you said is why we kept it a secret until the Festival began and why we put the time restriction on what counted.

It was just to thin out the population of pets some and increase the baseline price of most pets.

So mass breeding in hopes of another release contest soon probably wouldn't be a good idea unless you have plenty of stable space to fill up for a long time. =P

Thank you Krin, lol. I didn't think you would want to do this at every festival, but it's nice hearing that officially!

Unfortunately, the raise in prices was very short lived. They are already down to pretty much where they were before on most of the pets. It did flush a bunch of unwanted pets out though.

I like this idea, as long as the leader boards aren't live updates on how many enemies you defeated or nurtures you done that day. It'll display this value to you at the end of the day, and everyone will see how many points you earned that day (1-5, like in your description) along with your rank. This way other people can't see what leader board you're actively working on, or how much work you are putting into it.

The last few hours of contests with live updates are always very stressful. I suspect in this format with live updates, there will be many hurt feelings because of 2 people competing against 5 points and 4 points for that day. If the exact value of how many enemies someone has defeated is unknown, it takes some of that competition out of it, making for a more enjoyable event.

Also please make the overall contests shorter. I think 1 week is enough, lol

Also I just wanna say that for the nurturing contest, there's a limited number of eggs and hatchlings you can nurture in a given day. So to get first everyday, someone would still need to nurture all of them everyday.