Major issues with this website currently:

• Comp scene is dying. There are maybe 2/3 active competitive game at any time, whereas at peak hours in the old comp lobby there used to be more.
• Cheating is a moderate issue
• Despite merging lobbies, not enough players are transitioning from red heart > gold heart. There are players who exclusively play non-comp games as there is no incentive for them to step out of their comfort zone
• Players who make the transition are sometimes clueless new players. In short the transition is not smooth.

Solution:

• Make the competitive scene tiered via a league system: Bronze > Silver > Gold, but keep it in the same lobby
• Remove the useless 1500 point requirement to join competitions. Make it so that your red hearts turn into Bronze/Silver/Gold hearts whenever a round begins.
• Instead of having 1 or 2 out of 6 setups being played every round, make it so that you have 2 designated setups for each of the competitive tiers; the lower tiers having simpler setups. Bronze setups will likely just be Classic Maf and Basic Variant every round, or whatever is simple enough for new players.

At the end of each round:

• The top XX% of Bronze players will move to play Silver heart games for the next round
• The lower XX% of Bronze players will remain in Bronze for the next round
• The top XX% of Silver players will move on to player Gold heart games for the next round
• The middle XX% of Silver players will remain in Silver for the next round
• The lower XX% of Silver players will move down to Bronze for the next round
• The top XX% of Gold players will remain in Gold for the next round
• The lower XX% of Gold players will move down to Silver for the next round
• Players who do not "Join Competition" remain in their tier they earned from the previous round they played.

Clearly, there would have to be an initial calibration round for all players, where the top % of players are sorted into the Gold league, middle % into Silver, and the bottom % into Bronze.

Pros of making competitive games mandatory and tiered:

• It will basically disrupt cheating on alts
• It will make it extremely hard for friends who aren't running to throw for individuals as those individuals will be playing against players who are just as serious as winning the round as they are. For example, if I'm throwing for Sonse on multiple alt accounts, I can pretty much only do that in Bronze games and as soon as Sonse moves over to Silver games, I can't even play the same games as him. This also deters Friends throwing for each other just on a casual basis, as if I'm playing against/with my friends in Gold league games, I'd have to be pretty serious to have gotten there in the first place.
• It "forces" new players to transition into the competitive scene; they would be playing the same setups that they'd normally play (classic maf, basic variant, fancy pants, etc) anyways. But if they learn and progress to become better players and win more, they naturally transition into Silver league setups.
• This way, serious players participating in the competition won't have games taken away from them because a new player has no idea what they're doing (i.e., fresh 1,500 players).

Cons:

• There will have to be an initial round where everyone will have to play with each other just to calibrate what league people belong in.
• You can't play EM games during a competitive round and not invest heavily in it without risking being demoted from gold>silver/silver>bronze. In other words, if you only play 3 games in an entire round, then you're likely going to go down a league. This can be a good thing as it promotes the use of Custom Lobbies, though.