having long ages once in a while helps the competiveness of the following ages a lot since you can't just expect the age to be the same length as usual and therefore have to compete for longer than if you knew the length of the age or risk beeing defeated by someone who did not enter slacking mode as early as you did. WW crown is still fairly open and possible honor crown too, althougth I don't check on that ranking very often, but atleast lots of reasons to keep staying sharp, and keep playing to have fun rather than go into slacker mode.