How can we save the "Heroes" theme?

You could also hold a creative contest on the Heroes theme, or an avatar contest (a real one, not the poor imitation that exists)... Tournaments are tournaments, but they will also get boring eventually. You need to look further ahead and develop the forum in several directions...

In my opinion, if everyone gets tired of the tournaments and they are no longer held, then there will be nothing to do here at all :)

but if you open this school, people will come on their own, and the prizes are something that can be acquired... you could give some kind of portal currency or something similar to Rep...

And why have different schools and contests if there are no tournaments? In my opinion, things are not bad with the tournaments now, so I don't understand and don't see any tragedy in the fact that the Heroes theme is being overshadowed. Personally, I don't mind the off-topic discussions; add another 1000 off-topic threads and put them on the main page. If I don't need it, I won't go there. The main thing is that a person can EASILY find the page where the tournaments are held :)

Added after 13 minutes

To revive interest in Heroes, I would like to suggest working on creating FAQs for other parts of Heroes, besides the third one. For example, I haven't seen a single good manual for the fourth one, and for other parts either. This could also bring people together, at least for a while, but for the most active fans of Heroes.

The main problem in Heroes 4 (it's interesting what will be in the FAQ-4 :) is the long and tedious battles. Many people give up on Heroes 4 because of this. It's not very interesting to manually fight such battles, and besides, it takes a lot of time, which is spent on simply moving pieces around the field back and forth and does not require any intellectual effort, and nwcAres has been officially banned since the battle loop :)
Example: a battle between a hero with a summoned fairy against Walking Plants. After all the plants' arrows are spent on the fairy, you summon another batch of fairies and the battle is won NO MATTER WHAT. Is it worth manually fighting with 7 fairies against a hundred plants to finish the battle???

Therefore, on the one hand, you want to somehow revive the Heroes theme, and on the other hand, you don't want to deviate from the standards adopted on other portals, which, with their bans, raise mindless followers who just mindlessly press keys - this applies to Heroes 4, which is in a deplorable state on this resource.