So the biggest problem I see to start is who honestly thought starting this on Christmas day was a good idea like wtf? A lot of people travel and are busy for the holidays this is just a big middle finger to anyone who actually has familial obligations. Yeah you can argue that well there's like 2-4 weeks to play, but that's still straight up putting people at a disadvantage.
The next big problem is trickjumps. There were many people including myself that had suggested not allowing old demos to be submitted. It's very stupid that mireal or jorge (no flame to these beast airpogo gamers) can submit a jump from 2016 and win despite not having opened the game in over a year. I've yet to hear a good counterargument to a point Boshy brought up in his BG6 suggestion pastebin (
https://pastebin.com/qijVaNKV) where just allow these old tricks but penalize anything not done during the actual event. It's also not like there wasn't a lack of time to discuss this seeing as this pastebin is from September and supposedly the organizers had read it but didn't bother to ask the community about trying to change this.
Another issue related to trickjumping and allowing older jumps has to do with the current prize pool distributions. 1st place solo is 4.4% of the prize pool while 2nd place on a map is only 4%. What this means that if someone like jorge with a ton of old stockpiled trickjumps wants to submit he realistically could win more of the prize pool than someone that actually plays during the event itself. This is both a flaw in the prize pool distribution and in the allowing old trick jumps.
Another issue with trickjumps is that it's not a smart idea to only have a solo category and combine demo and soldier. Unless I'm reading this wrong, what's going to happen is you're just going to have 3 soldier jumps win the solo category. Solo demo and soldier tricks are not really comparable and there's a general bias towards soldier in everything. There's literally no point in choosing to between demo and soldier trickjumping when soldier would just give you a higher chance of winning.
This last issue also with tricks is kinda minor, but the weapon swapping plugin to do stuff with both rockets and stickies should not be allowed. It was really entertaining and creative first seeing it last year, but it's incredibly gimmicky and with this change of no class specific solo tricks you're actively disadvantaging yourself really by not using it. There's much more you can do with both guns compared to only one. This was another suggestion in the aforementioned pastebin that the organizers should be aware of but wrote off without any comment for whatever reason despite the few people I've talked to about the subject agreeing.
I understand that putting together these events is a lot of work for not a whole lot of praise especially this year with all the problems related to getting the maps done but it's disappointing to see so many shortsighted or lazy decisions that could've been improved with a simple forum post shorter than this reply.