If you don't add to the game database then I don't see anyway that users can win on social / misc points.  Looks like the game database users will always win the competition for points.  Right now you have Blacksaber (2,983 points), VXIII (1,477 points) and Fab_GS (875 points) which they earned most their points from game database.  Acevil (853 points) is the closest person that mainly earned their points through social (668 points from social) and even though he is in 4th right now he is pretty damn far behind.

What is the point of the competition?  Is it to award the game database users?

The only way I see is to take the fight to them =/
(or, convince them to give their prizes to YOU!)

The Game Database is far from complete. If you want to get points and help the site, get contributing.

It was the fastest way of earning VG$ back in the day, as well, according to Nordlead (wherever the hell he's gone). Though I do miss the Prediction League.

You have to remember they're simply volunteers, and don't get any pay, so they shouldn't be excluded. They do a lot for the site for nothing.

With that said, anyone here is more than capable of competing with them.

It's good that it takes more than some forum spamming to win, me thinks. Plus, the Databasers should get some credit for what they do.

I am not trying to diss or make what they do unimportant. I am just pointing out that if you don't add anything to the database then you probably have 0% chance in winning.

I would like to contribute myself to the database but I have no idea where to start. Should I go back a few generations and try and add old games? Do I add new games? I just don't know where to effectively start at to make any difference. With my luck I would just be trying to add games that are already in the database.

You could always go through your game collection and see if they are missing something in the database. Lots of games are missing banners, and I guess you could add a screenshot or two to some games.

Ah screenshots...  Completely forgot about them.  I picked up a lot of points back in the day posting Animal Crossing City Folk and WoW screenshots.  I suppose I'll focus on screenshots, banners, etc first.  Seems like the easiest place to start with to me.

I found the easiest way to earn points is to add critic scores. Just go to the database and manually look for games that aren't as popular, then go to Metacritic and look for the reviews from the sites (or magazines) that are still missing.
Just did that for DBZ Burst Limit yesterday and could add ~15 reviews in no time and got 5 points for each added review.
And since most of the reviews are for multiple platforms, you can earn twice or even thrice as much without any additional effort.

However after I saw Blacksaber getting over 1000 points in a few hours I was completely demotivated. Now I'm just waiting until we're able to post our User Reviews again.

I used to pick a console and then go from the best selling to the lowest selling games and see if they were missing their reviews.

I've done so for all Dreamcast and N-gage games available on Metacritic and hundreds of PSP games.