Currently, events are ultra competitive no matter what they are. That's fun for some people but generally speaking it's very exclusive. I know I stay out of most leaderboards personally and just pick one or two per year that I really go for.
The suggestion:
Make events more cooperative than competitive.
How it works:
- Remove leaderboards entirely. Or if they stay, they're just bragging rights without having any benefit. (Maybe one or two events with real leaderboards is fine but honestly I would prefer none)
- Keep personal milestones but make them achievable (the current ones are usually pretty good)
- Make site-wide milestones for if enough people turn enough things in among all users
- If the site reaches the milestones, everyone gets something nice
- Turning things in still gives you personal points to buy things from event shops (don't make these prohibitively expensive)
- If we want to still encourage participation beyond the personal milestones then maybe there could be a prize at the end for anyone that participated, or the site-wide milestones could go only to users that participated at any point during the event (doesn't have to be before the milestone was reached so it doesn't turn into a competition to keep people out)
Why:
- We have such a small userbase, I think fostering a sense of community rather than competition is important
- The current leaderboards are impossible for new users or users that can't spend literally 10+ hours per day on the site during the event and with so many adults that have real responsibilities as part of our userbase that's not really helping anyone (related to this is the issue with a solid 48 hours for egg hunting but that's a separate discussion that I bring up every event anyway)
- Right now most events feel more like a chore than fun to me because it's just stress the whole time. Events should be fun!
Normal User
Moderator
Normal User
Normal User
Normal User
Normal User
Normal User
Normal User