You have some good thoughts. I'm not sure I agree, though, that the ranking system is unfair. Your rank once you enter the player vs. player modes does definitely unbalance the game, but it's not an accident how you end up there. Playing the preliminary matches better than the other players is an important strategy to winning the tournament, and I think that's ok. Interestingly, though, note that the players on the VERY top of the rankings going into the qualifying round usually don't wind up ahead by the end -- usually it means they've sacrificed long term investments to get short term investments.

On the other hand, I do think you make an astute point that eliminating inactive accounts prior to the qualifying round would make this *less* of a factor, as well as reducing the risk of running up against a snipe attack. The question then is what criteria do I use to identify an inactive account? There are different levels of inactivity.

Elsewhere in this thread, Gil mentions penalizing inactive accounts on a day-to-day basis. But I still have a question about how to define what "inactive" is. Not spending gold on a particular day could be part of a purposeful strategy. But let's say I penalize (or, by your suggestion, eliminate) the accounts of people who are inactive, where "inactive" is defined by someone who doesn't distribute stat points and set a strategy every day.

Such a person could *still* snipe. He distributes points and sets strategies every day, but he waits to spend all his gold for the qualifying round, and then he really loads up.

So I don't think we're there yet. I think we might be enclosing on a workable solution, but I don't think we're there yet.

By the way, you wondered why there are so many inactives each month. I would be surprised if there weren't. People are always seeing the "new game!" notice on the main page, check it out, set up for the first day, and then forget about it or decide they don't want to keep playing. By that point, their characters are set up and locked into the tournament.

I suppose I could at least eliminate the accounts of people who haven't even logged *in* since the first two or three days. That would decrease the number of free passes people get in the qualifying round, though it wouldn't do a thing against snipe prevention.

The second tournament idea sounds great, by the way, but it would be a lot of work I'd rather spend writing a new game.