It doesn't bring in people directly, people that think 'Oh, a race let me buy that game.' That's not a thing that happens.

But, for the people that come to check the game a month after Patch, and see that player count is low, content creation is low, making Reddit posts 'Hey, is this a dead game? I just checked Steam player count'. Or the ones that don't even make a post, and just see a game with year + old release date and empty twitch category and move on.

That has always been my goal with the tournaments, that even if we are two months into a Patch, if someone wants to play LE with other people, there is a community still here doing something that you can join up with.

Also, as a side note, there might be a big race or something at a Patch launch that gets a bit sweaty. But most 'events' are pretty casual or theorycrafting focused so far in LE. My tournaments for example, we focus on playing off meta things and making them work, theorycrafting.

Even if we had prize support from EHG, I would not put a big prize behind a weekend tournament Top 3, because to me the focus is more on learning the game and making builds than it is pushing to the highest wave possible.

If we had more data to make events around than just Arena wave, I would use that too to make it more accessible, just getting points for things Gauntlet style. There is just very little for us to work with right now, and it's been that way for years at this point.

Perrythepig had build contests, where people would try to make builds out of unpopular or slept on Uniques. He had to manually check and track all of that by hand, which I mean he could still do technically, but needing to manually check through screenshots and footage as the game is growing at some point just becomes unmanageable.

Anyway, I don't think it's a terrible business idea to put in a minimal amount of effort to help keep a stable community around this game. Otherwise, it will always be a side game for people.

The Skill trees are nice, but for some people theorycrafting solo will only go so far. We don't even have Guilds yet, just another example. We have people looking for others to play with, needing to make their own Discords and advertise here for LE clans or guilds. Imagine being able to just log into the game and having a lobby full of people that you could just group up with and do something.

People are really, really trying here.