I think that the team member who suggested it could be an issue of awareness has a good point. I was a lurker on this forum for a long time before I joined the tournament last year and I've noticed that this whole forum seems to have got quieter and quieter over the years.
A few suggestions:
- if anyone is on other Sims forums or social media groups related to Sims, encouraging them to post about the tournament close to when it starts
- also encouraging people to share it on general social media if they're up for doing so
- perhaps Carl would be willing to post a news item about it on the Carl's guide front page when the tournament starts next year...?
- if anyone is a regular member of a Sims Youtuber or Twitch streamer's community, perhaps they could try to get them interested in the tournament or even just in one of the events. If a youtuber/twitcher mentioned it on stream to their followers (or better yet, streamed an old challenge), that would probably reach a lot of people, even if just a small percentage come here from that...
Unfortunately I'm not in any other sims forums/communities/etc and don't use social media so I can't really help out beyond offering up some ideas. I do sometimes mention this tournament when talking to friends and acquaintances about what I've been up to - I just say I'm participating in an unofficial casual sims tournament. Most people seem to think it sounds pretty interesting when I tell them about it but they're not simmers so I'm not actually convincing anyone to sign up. Simazing race has been a great one to talk about actually because people instantly get the connection from the name.
Thoughts about the tournament itself...
I prefer just 1 event per month. I don't have a lot of time to play sims and I doubt I'd be able to participate much in any events that only last a week. Maybe if they were really short simple things I might be able to fit it in but I don't know.
With that said... If I have to sit out an event sometimes that's okay with me so long as I can still participate at other times. From my perspective, it seems like one of the reasons participation is down is that most people are busy and don't have much time to play. So it seems quite possible that some very short focused challenges might bring in some new people, or even bring back some of the players who joined in previous years.
On the other hand it's possible that increasing the number of events overall could be a bit offputting to those who already don't have much time to play.
Perhaps you could do a mix...? Something like every second or third month has 2 very short, very focused challenges instead of 1 normal challenge. And we could choose to do either one or both.
I'm not sure how you'd work scoring if you did it this way though - I can see reasonable arguments for both 1) making all events worth the same (except for the finale), or 2) for making the short events worth less than the normal ones.
I think a few more pack focused events could be good. Though I do appreciate that you have been making an effort to keeping things accessible to people who don't have all the packs. But I'm sure I'm not the only one who likes how challenges force you to explore areas of the game that you might not have bothered with yet.
(Case in point - I picked up Cottage Living at some point when it was on sale this year but I haven't even got around to installing it yet because all of the time I've had available for Sims lately has been going on this tournament and it didn't seem like it would add anything particularly helpful to any of the recent events. So an event that focuses on some aspects of Cottage Living would be cool.)
How about reducing the requirement to be on the leaderboard to 2 events? Honestly I don't think it really matters - it could even be just 1 event - as someone who only does 1 or 2 events isn't going to be competitive overall with people who participated in more. But it's nice to see your name on the board and making it 2 events instead of 3 would make that a bit easier.
Speaking of the leaderboard, I personally think the participation component should probably be worth a bit less and the wins component should probably be worth a bit more. (Maybe 40/60..?). Also I think it's a bit weird that winning an event with very few participants gets you more points relative to 2nd, 3rd place, etc than winning a big event. I'm not really sure how you could do that part differently but surely winning an event with a large field of participants is significantly more difficult than winning a small event. But I also know that you've used this particular approach to calculating scores for ages so maybe there's no point changing it. Just thought I'd put this comment out there... I'll still participate, assuming my schedule allows, regardless of how scoring the leaderboard works because it's mainly the challenge of doing events that appeals to me.
