Asking for more than 10 chests isn't really about tournament ease or difficulty, it's about providing more challenge. Making it harder to reach the 10th chest would be a sure fire way to piss off the entire player base, so probably not the best fix
Tournaments are an interesting beast, in that they can be as "difficult" as you want to make them. Though, it is unusual to equate tournament difficulty to the number of chests your FS can obtain by the end. Difficulty is commonly associated with the potential loss of troops or goods in any particular tournament. Players can control this loss by limiting the number of provinces they play for that tournament but players generally agree that the Scrolls tournament is the hardest or, at least, one of the hardest ones due to the loss potential.
In terms of the number of chests your FS can achieve during any tournament this is generally down to willingness rather than actual "difficulty". I have been in FSs that could very easily hit 10 chests every week but that wasn't the point of those FSs, i.e. they were created as a chill space for players that enjoyed the game but didn't want to partake in events too seriously, which is totally fine. If they hit 6 chests that was an achievement but it didn't really matter. So, if you're in a FS that doesn't hit 10 chests and there's no appetite to hit 10 chests but you, personally, want to hit 10 chests are you in the right FS?
Hitting 10 chests is actually super easy. Before anyone kicks off allow me to explain. 10 chests is 40,000 points from the whole FS. Assuming a full FS of 25 members this would be, per member:
- 6 provinces for 6 rounds. As this would require doing 2 rounds in 1 of the 5 days, which messes with bedtime, I gather not many people do 6 rounds. I could be wrong but it doesn't really matter.
- 8 provinces for 5 rounds, which is very easily doable.
- 11 provinces for 4 rounds, for those with time zone issues or real life responsibilities.
Completing 6 or 8 provinces takes mere minutes and can usually be done with just auto-fight and a bit of negotiating. Past the 2nd round things can get a bit hairy after the 6th province, so may need some manual fighting or a larger goods base to accommodate the extra negotiating.
Granted, for absolute newbies this isn't feasible but once they've done a bit of exploring and unlocked the first 6 units with a couple of unit upgrades to T2 this becomes crazy easy. An especially active newbie can be hitting 1600 points by the start of week 3. Less active ones will take a bit longer but what's the rush?
We now come to strategy. If you're going to be a tournament-focused player the first thing you should do is stop taking those optional squad size upgrades. Technically, if you take them it's not the end of the world. The tournaments aren't technically more difficult from a proportionate troop loss perspective but the larger your squad the larger the NPC's squads will be, which means you'll lose more troops than if you had a smaller squad, which is what we mean by "difficult" in tournaments
But that's all the strategy I'm going to discuss as there are reams upon reams of information on tournament strategy by far more experienced players than I.
So, back to the original point: we are asking for more chests to present more of a challenge. Will this scare away newbies? It's hard to understand why. If the newbies aren't going to be tournament-focused then it won't make a blind bit of difference to them. If they are going to be tournament-focused then surely it's just another challenge to rise to. First thing they need to do, as the rest of us have done, is grow to a size where they can make an impact on any tournament-focused FS, which isn't actually that large at all. Like I said, as soon as they have 8-11 of each province type plus a few T2 units they're ready. Then they need to be sure they're in a tournament-focused FS. I'm not even saying that you can only focus on one thing when playing this game. At the moment I'm in a FS that is technically tournament-focused but our AM so rarely cracks the whip that I can barely remember when that last was. Our FS is super chill and those that want to push it in tournaments do so and those that don't hit the minimum requirement and everyone's happy.
#inb4 some special snowflake say, "There are many playing styles! You can't dictate how I play my game! I'm no sheep!" Whilst this is 100% true if conventions already exist to circumvent known problems why not use them? I'm not saying to use all said conventions but maybe one or two, surely? If unwilling I can tell you now that whining never solved any problem, which is something we should have learned as ickle chillun. Just saying
As is the case with any successful aged game there is a certain balancing act between accommodating newbies and accommodating seasoned players. Maintaining the status quo under the illusion of helping newbies simply alienates the veterans. Not to say that keeping veterans is more important than catering for newbies but Doctor Who learned the hard way that if you're going to piss off your dedicated fan base you are going to fall so very hard. So, the tournament system needs to keep advancing, for the same reason that more tech chapters are added every 6 months.
In terms of dead cities: a lot of them, I imagine, are players creating 2nd or 3rd account but not getting the resource combination they were after, so start again, so they should disappear and be replaced soon after. Granted there will be those who progress past chapter 3 or bought some diamond who become inactive and I totally agree that they should be exiled to the frigid outer rings of the map until they become active again.