With the new monthly badges for achieving certain top 10s in points from division progress daily those that are in "Champion" divisions are at a huge disadvantage, even with adding more champion divisions. That doesn't solve the problem, that just makes more daily divisions in each game running with champions battling champions. Not all games use these champion divisions either (Pot of Gold for example), it's not balanced. Why not just retire champion divisions and have everyone playing against each other fairly?

Of course it'll be harder for new players to win certain badges but guess what it was just as hard for the players that have put the years in to get to the champion status to get those badges initially.

I'd also like to add from the other side of the spectrum, and I have wanted to bring this up for a while actually, champions divisions can also be a deterrent to getting all the badges in one daily game. For example, my favourite game on the website is the easy 'Who am I?' game. I love trying to beat my high score and get faster every day but I haven't played it in months (and only when I go for an Everything Challenge run) because I know I've only got a certain amount of games left until I get the 50,000 Whozit Points and then I can never play the mode again. I'd love to be able to play that permanently, against the champions too.

I'd also like to add that with only hard and champ scores counting towards the TvT leaderboards, if Who Am I is a monthly category I don't play it because of this issue and so can't help my team out. If the champions division was removed I could play hard mode when it's a monthly category and easy mode when it's not.

How would pairing champions with novices and casual players be fairer than dividing players according to ability?

EDIT: I ask this with all sincerity. Maybe I'm not understanding what you mean?

I loathe playing in the Champion division in Who Am I? I am by no means a champion player. I hated being in the Champions in hourly games before those were abolished. All I did was slog away and win badges. Then I felt punished for winning them. I was playing against the true champion players and getting loser scores every time.

Maybe for the daily games, the answer could be a dynamic division assignment similar to what duels do - there is some preference for sending players to higher or lower divisions based on their progress, but you could technically wind up anywhere. It would just be very rare for a top player to be in the lowest or a new player in the highest ones.

That would create some steeper competition as you go and still give newer players a chance to win, but without the massive wall that is Champs.

And I agree - WAI Champs is a bad thing, you should be able to play Easy for Everything.

I know you are talking about the Everything badge, but it sounds like you are suggesting that to make the Everything badge feasible, FT might start allowing the Easy mode to count for TvT games. Is that right? If so, would it be just for WAI or for other games as well?

It was capital "Everything" - the badge and high score.

Players who are champs are at a disadvantage for that because they can't play WAI easy and there is no score bonus for hard.

The team part is not an issue - it's up to a player whether they want to play for the team or themselves and a player who wants both can always play their WAI set as the last game in an Everything try. If their score before WAI is such that they will meet or miss their target either way (the most common case), they can play hard, if a high score, tier or 20/20 threshold is just in range, they can play easy and won't likely miss more than a handful of team rounds per month.

Honestly, I wish there was a medium challenge level to "who am I". The easy is just a test in how fast your eye hand coordination is. The "hard" is much more difficult. Maybe I don't know who a lot of random people are, or maybe if I spent time playing hard I would start to learn who they are. But for now hard is not much fun to me and easy is just too easy.

As for some perspective on "Championship" levels, I have almost no hope of ever winning a day at Pot of Gold. It doesn't stop me from playing it. Same with Daily Game and World. I don't have to win the game to enjoy it. However, I do like the tiers for the hourly games. Because it is thrilling to see a great score (for me) actually win my division rather than be in 3rd or 4th place of one of the non tiered daily games. If you randomly put an amazingly fast player in my humble tier you could be taking that win away.

I am a runner. As a runner we run races. There are a few who compete for first place. The rest of us want to do the best we can and maybe get a personal best. Running is a very supportive sport as we really encourage one another to do our best regardless of if it is better or worse than our own effort. You have all kinds of folks here at FT. A few want to be the very best and want to beat everyone else. The rest of us just want to challenge our brain and get excited when we achieve personal bests.