I loved Heads Contest, but it did have two major flaws. One, there were not enough participants, and two if you 'won' second or third place you were kinda screwed.
HC gave some pretty good rewards, but second/third place got only half the rewards first place got and with no way to try again this resulted in a sort of match fixing where some of the stronger players would decide not to participate in the same contests, leaving the lower ranks to be filled up by the unsuspecting noobs and alts.
I would suggest allowing anyone to participate, but have rewards depend on previous achieveme