Citizens,
Apologies for not creating an announcement for the start of the competition.
I really hope everyone enjoyed it and looks forward to its return next year. We had a bit of a rocky start, and we certainly weren't anticipating such huge participation - I'm surprised the servers held up as well as they did. There are optimisations and improvements to be made and I can't promise there won't be lag next time - but we can do our best. It's never as simple as just upgrading a server.
Creating drama and emotion (positive or negative) is what I strive for with every new feature, and I think we certainly achieved that. I'm really proud of the community for embracing their teams with passion and loyalty, watching everything unfold and spectating the live scoreboard was really fascinating. For the first half of the competition, I was worried the scoring system wasn't working out - but after everything I think we were very close and some minor changes can be made for next year. The important thing is giving participants the ability to contribute outside of the 2pm elimination times, there was so much emphasis on removing points from other teams that it came down to the wire pretty much every time - also something I wasn't really anticipating.
Each year, we'll mix things up by changing around the teams. Currently there are 17 different teams of which 12 were randomly selected, we hope to increase the size of this pool by next year to keep things fresh.
Congratulations to Mountain Men.
Thanks.