Festival Skin Entries by Year
Me and my friends who regularly enter festival contests have felt for the past few years that the number of entries per contest have dropped. Today we finally decided to compile every single festival submission thread since 2013 and see if that's true! This was pretty interesting, so we wanted to make a quick post to share the results. You can find the spreadsheet here.
*Note that 2013 only had 6 festivals contests, and we are only 3 contests into 2025.
2015 had the highest amount of total entries that year.
Arcane 2015 holds the highest non-2013 record of entries at 45 pages.
The flights with the highest number of entry pages total is Arcane at 285, Light with 280
The lowest pagecount total is not actually Earth but Wind with 178 pages!
The total number of entries per festival has definitely been in drastic decline since 2015. What's the reason for this?
Contest prize went up to 1.5kg for Plague 2014, then to 2kg for Light 2019.
Fest entry slots scaled these fests: Light 2013 - 6 slots Fire 2013 - 8 slots (+2) Plague 2013 - 10 slots (+2) Fire 2014 - 12 slots (+2) Fire 2015 - 14 slots (+2) Light 2023 - 16 slots (+2) Light 2024 - 20 slots (+4 - 2 permababy 2 general)
Light and Fire in 2013 did not have separate submission and discussion threads. We filtered the pages into those that contained an img and those that did not.
2023 Rockbreakers is an outlier. Entry pages are unusually high for that year (29 pages) because we ran a 500g giveaway to enter the contest.
...although, 29 pages would've been the norm in 2015-2016!
Pretty interesting data!
My own thoughts:
The observation that started this off was that Nature remained consistently high in entries over the past 4 yrs while every other flight seemed to decline. This is still true! Nature is the only flight that remains able to break the 20 page barrier!
Why has the userbase doubled, but festival submissions grow fewer and fewer each year?
What was going on in 2016?
Here's a link to the submission thread compilation on FR; I can't add the links on Tumblr, the site thinks I'm a spambot.
Could we get this data side by side with
New User Registration Windows
New breed releases
Major lore, site, and QoL updates
I think that might show us some patterns. I'm theorizing people enter more right after the release of a new breed, especially if it drops right before their flight's festival.
2016 was a big release valve year for new users coming into the site and a few pretty big updates that brought old users back. Color wheel expansion especially. Purely speculating there as well, but that was a good year for a lot of us older players being really into this game.
