2 things already suggested would need to occur for this to be successful: reduce the amount of Official Servers and implement a subscription service.
780 servers is a lot, each with their own histories, current events and player behaviours. It waxes and wanes too. Some servers are notorious for past wars. Home servers are a big thing as well. That’s just touching the surface.
To expect 1 person to be hired to do this would be insane. They’d also need several for different timezones, regional languages, plus covering day and evening/night.
In order to justify their salaries (and definitely NOT at minimum wage) they’d need to have revenue for that. We have no data to understand the impact of the BLB on their revenue. As it is understood, it was to support development. How much of that is profit and how much of it would they even be willing to allocate to an additional and costly department such as proper Official Administration?
I’d like to reiterate as above, I would be willing to spare my hard earned $ on a monthly subscription to play on maintained Officials.
On that tangent it would have many beneficial shifts in behaviour: addressing alts, creation of clans for exploitative alt actions, alts for hacks, etc.,… an extra $15 per month would go a long way in weeding out a lot of undesirable behaviour. Giving up that money in order to play means more risk. Not just a $2 account. So you watch your p’s and q’s a helluva lot more.
As for contests, yes and they’ve announced that there’s some in the works. It appears contests have a 6 month interval with the most recent being an art contest which had less than 1 month between the announcement and deadline. That wasn’t ok in my books. Not to mention 1 of the winners having commented that they still hadn’t received the prize by almost a month (can’t find the comment about that anymore).