@
Just C it was dead before I took over too. I offered 2 buy in cypher tournaments (text and audio) that everybody signed up for because it's what they wanted, people were requesting buy in tournaments for good prizes and I found that information out from surveys about what would motivate people to drop more in the writers block lounge and also battle in the topical arena. Everybody signed up and said it was a dope idea, then nobody was interested when they actually had to 'buy in' which is fine, but I tried. (Money was going to be donated back to the site). I also tried to recruit people from other battling sites to come over to Letsbeef for said competition, as well as contacting established artists through twitter and they were going to join up as soon as people started to pay.
I also tried to run a hugely unsuccessful tournament, but the topical lounge was still at it's peek at that point with a lot of talent actually bothering to show up. I put a lot of effort into it to steer away from the generic depressing topics that put people off battling (again, researched peoples views on topicals and what stops them from taking part) by having concept rounds, again.. no shows.
So yeah, the Topical arena is dead. Part of it is my fault, but I did try. I would do a much better job at keeping something alive, than bringing it back from the dead, as would anybody.