The rewards for getting more chests are not intended to be an incentive, they are a sop to us for our complaints. We went from getting
nothing for anything past 10 chests, to getting something to acknowledge the effort, including up to 36,000 FS ranking points every week you manage it.
Last week over 50 fellowships across all servers got all 19 chests. Getting the necessary 160,000 points requires a variation on all 25 players in the FS getting 6400 points each or some to do much more than that. To do so requires at least several members to have 30+ provinces available for the tournament. As such, it funnels a bunch more stuff to 50+ groups that are already full of large active cities and are getting a bunch of stuff. It offers nothing to fellowships of less than 20 people ( a 20 person FS needs every member to get 8,000 points ) or who have a significant number of smaller members, so is one more incentive for aggressive fellowships to recruit high-level players aggressively. There is no incentive large enough for a player in chapter 8 to get their share, because they don't have enough provinces open to get 6400 points no matter how bad they want it.
To refer as I often do to the "read before posting" post in this forum:
Will it benefit players from all markets and all stages of the game?
The answer is no. It will offer benefit only to a small number of players in a full fellowship where the average player can finish at least 24 provinces to six rounds.
I'll now refer to the senior forum moderator on the En servers, where this was debated hotly in the past:
"
What the Devs did not want, is to increase the amount of Chests required to "complete" the Tourney as it were. I'm reminded of how some months ago, the overall opinion was that the Tourney had become far too difficult beyond a certain point and 10 Chests was potentially unachievable for Higher Ranking Fellowships?
It is the choice of Fellowships if they wish to compete for Tournament Greatness, above and beyond that of the 10 Chests. However the Devs will not be looking to award anything further than what they currently do for the Bonus Chests."
That may, of course, change, but it will almost certainly require a well thought out plan and demonstrate value to more than a small number of players.
Laid back fellowships are not likely to have the ability to make it to chest 19 even if they tried. It requires a total of 167,000 points to get all 19 chests. For a 25 member fellowship this requires an average score of 6,680. To get that score, you need to fully clear 25 tournament provinces. Casual players are not going to be able to do this.
Realistically, increasing the prize for chest 19 is only going to benefit the top fellowships on a server. I think there are less than 10 fellowships per server who do 19 chests on a regular basis. Probably another 20 or 30 fellowships who have the ability to do it every so often in a push situation. I doubt there are many beyond that.
Edit: Ninja'd because it took me over an hour to compose that