Bump!

This might be something for the player base to consider more than actually changing the event. Choosing the roles that fit your character while taking the roles responsibilities into consideration.

If you have a character that wants to fight but has no interest in keeping a herd, then perhaps consider the wildcard role. Part of a competitor's role is to go around collecting lone judges. (Not sure if its clear enough in the role info). The formation of herds is what gives the comps a reason to fight. While many characters are not strictly feral these days, the basic idea still exists that you fight to impress the judges and the judge decides if you're good enough to follow. If comps are not collecting judges, this aspect of the event is lost. And trying to rely on one or two comps to do the collecting first and then fight them after, will lead to the forest getting quiet real fast (which we may have seen this year).

On that note though, the wildcard role itself has always been vague imo. I don't know if its worth considering the challenger role again if there are enough comps that simply don't want to form/keep their own herds? This way we'll know what the characters intentions are easily as opposed to trying to guess and potentially have awkward encounters in the game.

Yep.

Would like to second the idea of bringing back the Challenger role, I did find it different enough from Competitors in the past usually. Visually (for me at least) it's easier to distinguish characters intents this way when looking at the map right away. I think the numbers might have seemed a little wonky because a lot of chars who want to be taken seriously choose Competitor as opposed to wildcard but then there's like 10 Competitors on the same map and splitting all the active judges between them can make the herds seem sparse...if that makes sense.