Since the most common pleb response is “How do you expect GFX staff to make that many decent quality hats” my answer is that I don’t. I think the hats are garbage to begin with, the GFX staff are severely lacking as shown by the failure that is this month’s VIP item, the “raccoon” morph that looks nothing like a raccoon. I don’t believe that top players participate to earn cosmetic items, but to prove that they are better than others and gain a sense of satisfaction from placing over their peers. To the next pleb response of “Then just host your own tournaments?” as someone who was hosting some of the first single spar tournaments frequently in 2011, a good amount of top players do not care unless it is an official server-wide tournament, and the satisfaction is not enough when you know that you aren’t really facing the best of the best. In my opinion the first place belt should become a permanent item, 2nd and 3rd place rewards should be replaced with gralats to solve the hat problem, 1st place should be granted the option to make their own hat, similar to how guilds with 1,000 hours holding towers used to be able to.

Also, the removal of the 1,000 hour hat reward single-handedly killed towering and it’s ridiculous to take something away and replace it only with the promise of “NGS will solve this” when this “NGS” has been a no-show for the past three years but that’s another subject.