That is a well made point Rob. I am fortunate to have a lot of spare time for this game and would have the time to play in three or four leagues but I do understand for some people time is tight.
The scores did rise fairly quick, but they are still rising, I have tried a few times to slow things down in previous contests but without success, I am not sure what the answer is unless a rule is brought in to limit the speed, a max number of raises per person per day and a limited size of raise might work and could be fixed by the contest host. There are a lot of different opinions on this subject I am sure. Some, I am sure, would like to get the bid up to max straight away so they know what they have to beat but the bidding system can never be totally fair to all players because we don't all reveal our max scores. You could open up a huge debate on this subject
but best done in a different forum.
Back to the contest, you just beat my highest score of 9686, I have been tweaking 9690 but it looks unlikely to ever work, a bit of a power to weight ratio problem
. I am keen to see how mi2 got more than this.