Bridging the Point Gap in Weekly Tournaments

(Due to my style of writing being rather... long, I've included a TL;DR at the bottom in the interest of expressing all of my points for anyone who wants to see them while still respecting any readers' time.) Hello! I would like to preface this by saying that I am not asking for a change to the weekly tournament's "top prize" system. I understand why this is in place and how it keeps PFQ's economy intact. What I have noticed, however, is that (depending on the tournament) there is usually a huge gap between the amount of points required to reach the "hard" difficulty, and the amount of points people on the very bottom of the leaderboard have. I can't say for sure what most people on the site's habits are, but personally I tend to participate in tournaments for the tokens alone, knowing that the top prize is typically an unrealistic goal for me despite the fact that I spend a considerable amount of time on Pokefarm. I've found that I usually clear the "hard" difficulty fairly easily within the first day or two. After that, the weekly tournament just sort of turns into an icon on my hotbar that I ignore for the rest of the week. Which brings me to my proposal: I think it would be within the interests of Pokefarm and the userbase to implement some sort of (small) reward for gaining additional points in weekly tournaments after reaching the hard difficulty. Something such as a reasonable amount of credits (or even a small amount of GP, or fairly common items that a user would reasonably want a lot of such as consumables or gems) per a certain amount of points (scaled with the difficulty of the weekly tournament) could make participating in tournaments week-long more worthwhile for users who don't have the time or resources to realistically compete for the top prize. Nothing that would give other users FOMO for not participating every single week, but something that could add up to make weekly tournaments more fun and rewarding to be a part of for the full week. Furthermore, it may make people who were aiming for the top prize, but couldn't make the cut feel a little less like they gave up a lot of time and energy for nothing. Of course, I almost never fall into this demographic, so I would appreciate some input on this from people who do shoot for the top prize. The main drawbacks I can think of to implementing this would be, firstly, that the gap may be an intentional feature so that all users aren't putting all their time towards weekly tournaments 24/7. Secondly, there are concerns about keeping the economy intact. I won't pretend to be an expert on the PFQ economy, but I don't think it's wrong to say that this could be an issue. Lastly, this may not be a problem for other users, but I suppose that's why suggestions go up for other users to see! You could most likely accomplish something similar by changing the points required to get to the hard difficulty, but I would assume this would be met with backlash from casual players who don't have the time to be participating that much. Adding new difficulty levels with more tokens is another option, but this would likely have a negative impact on the economy surrounding tokens considering the system regarding them has been more or less the same for years and years. The shortened version: There is a huge gap between the amount of points required to reach the "hard" difficulty in tournaments and the amount typically required to place on the leaderboard. I believe that for many users, myself included, this means that if you're not aiming to get on the leaderboard, you end up participating for the first day or two to get your tokens and then abandoning the tournament for the rest of the week. I think that implementing some sort of small, additional reward for extra points gained after reaching "hard" (such as a small amount of credits) may incentivize users to participate for the full week, and make tournaments a little more fun for users who are unable to participate enough to get the top prize. In conclusion, amidst the change to Arceus rank, I'm glad that users won't feel as forced to (if you'll mind the figure of speech) scramble for new eggs. Depending on how this impacts player participation, I think this could be a nice way to keep players coming back to weekly tournaments when they chew through the token requirement easily, but don't strictly need to be on top of the new eggs. Thanks for reading.

This is exactly the point of the current design. Everyone ought to be able to make the Hard goal with some mild effort to get their Tokens. But the competition for the Top 100 spots is always going to be fierce. This is especially true in the first two tournaments of a season, with new eggs on the line. With over 2.5k people playing, that Top 100 really is reserved for the most intense players. This is fine, because it is not a requirement to compete at that level if you are unable to do so. Adding further fixed goals would add more stress to the casual side of tournaments, which I believe would be detrimental.

Cool! Figured that might be the case, but I figured I'd propose the idea since I couldn't find anything about it anywhere. Thanks for responding! The main reason that design point of tournaments felt out of place to me is that most regularly-occuring server events do have a reward for extra participation (extra fragments in type race even after reaching the team goal, and for both Fab. Friday and MCW, interactions are always beneficial regardless of if there's an event going on, unless you've got an entirely empty party and have no use for int. points for some reason) so seeing the point total go up while not necessarily doing anything felt a little odd, but it stands to reason that Weekly Tournaments would be different since they're, well, weekly. Makes sense.