Whenever there's a competitive Community Goal, it inevitably goes exactly one way; in the first 12 hours, one side gets a lead. From that point onwards, most players join that side, for the better rewards. Result: That side wins by a landslide, and you know exactly which side will win almost immediately.
This is the result of flawed game design. Imagine if, for example, the scoring team in soccer was immediately given the ball again, 10 meters from the enemy goal? After a single goal, they would continue to score goals successively until the game couldn't possibly be won by the other team anymore.
That's essentially how current community goals work. The further ahead they are, the higher the rewards become, and the more likely new participants are to join them, driving things even further out of balance.
I have a simple way to solve this problem and make competitive community goals actually competitive; shared reward tiers. Take a look at this image.
As you can see, the A team has a large lead over the B team, but both of their point totals are added together to determine the rewards for both sides.
This means that the situation is reversed; players will always benefit from joining the weaker team, because of the lower threshold for higher rewards. It's much easier to get top 10% or 25%, for example.
This would result in truly competitive CGs, where fights can come down to the wire even at the very end!
I think this would be a huge improvement, but I'm open to feedback. Can you think of any reason why this would be a bad thing?
Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/EliteDangerous/comments/nrl4et/make_community_goals_competitive/
