I'm not, like... hard-opposed to a reward system, but I am kinda hesitant? I am worried that it might create a sort of gap between players -- like new players might end up missing out on a lot of plot/CR because it centers around exploring an island that only a small group of veterans have unlocked access to, etc. Especially in the case of challenges that are... limited? Like, to use the above as examples, only the number of people Whit can handle threading with are gonna get punched by Falcon, and I'd assume only so many islands can get discovered in a month.

I'm just tossing out blind wild ideas, so take them with a grain of salt, buuuut maybe I'm gonna pitch some other ideas?

- Make local unlockables game-wide, not character-specific, possibly with bigger groupwide requirements? (Like... x characters have to meet AC, x logs must be played to completion, etc)
- Make big rewards things you have to apply for, like extra character slots? Like, "okay you can have some smash balls if you link us [a major character development you partook in/CR with x different characters/4x the AC requirement]" so there's less dependency on doing plot-important or time-sensitive stuff and new players don't have to wait a month etc. to get one thing to sort of catch up to the veterans?
- Roulette-style things where people don't necessarily know in advance what they have to do to get a huge unlockable? Like when AC goes up include a "if this month your character did x, link it and win a free ipod get a smash ball" or whatever?