My Compliments to the FA Design Team on a vastly improved FA!
The new format (recent badge changes and tweaking, as well as the new questing system introduced about a year ago) is a better reflection of the strength of participating groups. Now you can't win first place just by demolishing all your buildings and making massive shanty towns, as was the case originally; now one needs some planning and skill and a well-developed city, and strong participation in the Spire and the Tournaments too.
The designers have a difficult task balancing the Adventures - strong groups like mine finished stage three and were in the Bottomless Pit 24 hours ago; while not-so-strong groups are still struggling.
They have to work out a solution that caters for very different fellowships - and in my opinion this is one of the best they have ever done!
Which is not to say that a little more tweaking would not be useful too!!
What I really like is that if the group has a nice simple system, it is no longer necessary to use a spreadsheet and count-down message threads - using 'Individual Balancing', the FA runs pretty much on AutoPilot and needs a lot less Admin work - which is most welcome, given that FA's happen a bit more often than many are comfortable with.
My own two solutions might be better I think:
a.
Have an Easy, Medium and Difficult path in each stage - each with their own mini-prize on the final waypoint. Weaker groups could do only the easy path and take the Stage Prize; stronger groups can hang around picking up extra goodies as well as Ranking Points.
b. My other suggestion would be to give out lots of
Artifact Fragments in all events including FA, Tournament and Spire - and when you had collected let's say 100, you could forge yourself an Universal Artifact that works on any building.
Then players would be motivated to do
every event - to collect fragments that eventually could be used to evolve a building of their choice...
I really do hope them will consider both these ideas!!