I've been wondering if there's going to be a tournament again next year. It's great to know there will be!
If there wasn't, I was thinking about seeing if there's any interest in an unofficial thing based around having a go at past tournament challenges. I've played some of them by myself already but I've still got plenty bookmarked that I'm interested in trying at some point. But official tournament challenges will probably take up all the time I have for sims, so that's a moot point now. (Unless you want to know the past challenges that are on my interest list).
In answer to some of your questions:
I like the majors and I also would prefer a slower monthly schedule. I don't know if it would be possible to manage both. Keep the majors but less other events? Only have one major?
I also think that what you've proposed might not actually be a slower schedule - having a month to play 3 weeks of game time doesn't seem like it'd be that much slower to me than having 3 weekends to play 2 weeks of game time. Personally I don't usually get to play much during the week anyway - Sundays are my main sims time, and it's rare that I'll manage to fit in more than one weekday evening (~2hrs) in a week.
I might be a particularly slow player though. Especially when I have lots of sims in a household.
I liked most of the events I participated in. I discovered new stuff about the game / tried out things I've never tried before in most or all of the events - which is the main reason I like playing challenges.
Personally I tend to prefer challenges where
a) you control a limited number of sims (< or = 4)
b) there isn't a lot of out of game tracking needed
That said, I still played and enjoyed challenges that don't fit these preferences like the big dreams finale. Though it's probably good that it was the last one for the year because I'm definitely over having 8 sims in a household now. Possibly I should have done like I did with the Tastes challenge and just had 6 sims but... It was a major! And a 6 sim household is still pretty slow going for me anyway. Also I couldn't just move someone out at the end of week 1, when I was having some regret over my earlier decision to adopt so many extra sims. Oh well... maybe next time I'll remember that I should stick with less.
I'd prefer slightly longer with the ruleset before a challenge starts. I think you gave us a week but the first part of the week usually overlapped with trying to finish up the end of the last challenge. Frequently I felt like that there wasn't much time or brain power to give to thinking about the new ruleset and questioning or testing stuff before it opened.
I also think longer rulesets could benefit by have the rules broken up into a couple of extra sections. For example the big dreams one - there ended up being a lot of points under the Specific Challenge Rules heading. Breaking it up into a main section and a clarifying points section (or something like that) would probably make the rules easier to take in.
In general though I think the challenge team do a great job and hopefully - assuming my schedule allows - I'll be participating again next year.
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