Increase Weekly Tournament Leaderboard Size

Suggestion Title: Increase Weekly Tournament Leaderboard Size Suggestion Summary: Exactly what it sounds like. Instead of a top 100, the tournaments could have a top 200, or a top 150 if that's too big a jump, or some other less round number determined by staff. Positive points: - Would balance the competitiveness of tournaments with the number of active users. I don't know how long it's been since the size of the leaderboard has been revisited, if ever. - Could encourage more people to participate in tournaments if there's a more realistic chance of placing. This could also increase site activity overall. - I ended up missing the hard goal of the last tournament by just a few points because I wasn't feeling well on Friday. When I mentioned this to a friend the next day, they jokingly said I should have stayed up late no matter how bad I felt or set an alarm for the middle of the night to see if I felt better enough then to get that last set of scours. I know they were joking, and they know that I wouldn't actually do anything like that for a game, so we had a laugh. But then I remembered some of the scores on the leaderboard and wondered how many people did do something like that to rank. Altering the competitiveness of the tournaments to suit the increased number of active users would encourage healthier habits in players. Negative points: - Could reduce the competitiveness of tournaments too much so that it no longer feels like an accomplishment to rank (if it turns out not to increase participation at all). - More players each week would receive a prize egg. Although, given that the Pokémon hatched from those eggs are account locked, and there's no longer as much of a rush to regain Arceus rank after the rank updates (incredible update, that; no notes), I'm not sure there would be any wider impact of this? The 1/100 guaranteed special rate of prize eggs might also need to be revisited (perhaps just kept at one special per week instead of scaling with leaderboard size) if having too many new exclusive specials showing up would be a problem. - Could affect the player-run token market (market prices might drop/stabilize earlier in the season). Reason For Consideration: Niet has spoken recently about how the site's active userbase and average activity has increased, and made some changes in consideration of that (increasing the bonus counter and fabfriday goals). This would just be another balance change that accommodates the increased active userbase.

Support! Back when I first started playing this game, getting top 100 felt achievable without letting this game dominate over important irl stuff like school and sleep. Back then though you have probably 1.5k people on average entering. Last week's tournament had 3.7k people entering! Which is great and all but at the same time it also makes getting into top 100 much harder due to the increase in participants. People might say "it's a competition, not everyone can be a winner" to which I totally agree - full disclosure, I've never to my memory actually gotten in the top 100 - but the main difference now is the feeling of how achievable winning the egg of the week is. I could put in a ton of effort back then and get close, and that felt really cool! Like next week maybe I could do it! Nowadays it just feels like...why bother? The scores are getting higher, I'm not going to be able to get close to it, why put any more time into the tourney other than what it takes to get the hard goal? I don't think the increase should be too big - maybe 150 people? - but I do think one would help balance things out a bit with the increase in site activity. After all, there were changes made to type race competitions for a similar reason, so why not with the weekly tournaments?

I personally think the top 100 cutoff is just around the right place. I understand the sentiment here but I think it mostly only applies to scour tournaments, which we've unfortunately had two of in a row. Scour tournaments are the only one where you have to be online periodically but not actually be active on the site, just check in to retrieve and reset your scours. In all the other tournaments, you can put in effort and grind yourself into the top 100 with a decent amount of activity.

I'm 50/50 honestly. On one hand, it's would be great to have an increase! I'd love for more people to win something! On the other hand though, 100 is pretty generous tbh. I've played games where there's only the top 3 or 5, and I belive they've had more active players than pfq. So honestly I love the idea, but I'm not sure if it's needed for lack of a better term? I feel like top 100 is fine as is

Support, I consider myself an active player and I have definitely sacrificed my health more than once to stay on the leaderboards. That's not inherently anyone's fault but my own, I know, but I think there's a point to be made with the size of the playerbase growing and the tourney board not growing with it. The competition only gets more aggressive and even tourneys I once breezed through have become hard-fought struggles to even place. Genuinely, I don't think I could put it better than this.

I like this idea, but I've been thinking about the thing where one of the eggs won from the tournament is guaranteed to hatch as a special. Maybe it could be changed so the top 150/whatever got an egg, but the guaranteed special was still only for one of the top 100 eggs? So then there'd be an incentive to get to the top 100 (for the 1/100 chance of a special), but more people would still want to compete to try and win an egg. I hope that makes sense. I'm definitely less interested in tournaments than I used to be and it is partially that the top 100 feels so impossible now