Can't access Theory Tournament. Is my game ruined?

[Lizwiz]

I am not transported to the quiz, so this closes any further quests for the Mage Guild.
I've been in and out of the Mage Guild dozens of times and asked to go to the Tournament over and over again but it never happens.
So I did Bring Back A Book, and Have Highest Mind (including getting the bonus). Tried to go to the Tournament after each quest, but no luck.
This is my second play-through of LF2 and there was no problem first time. I replayed LF1 to get the manor house and that's the only difference I can think of in my game import.
Any help please?

[Kale]

I found a post from 8 years ago that indicates you just need to ask about the theory quiz, leave the Mage Guild, then re-enter the guild and ask about the quest again. Sounds like that didn’t work.

If Sandra mentions the quiz "is not ready yet", then the only other theory I had is that you need to advance the main quest a bit. A lot of quests seem to be locked behind main quest progress. If you check your quest log; I think there is a part where it mentions your "main quest". You might try doing that, if it doesn't lock out any other quests by doing so?

Alternatively, make sure you have done everything in the Walkthrough prior to it mentioning the theory quiz, namely that you've recruited Petula, done the "found the Lost Bundle" quest, done the "Rival Guild" quest, the "Clean the pond of Moormore" quest, and the "Create Magical orb" quest as well. One of those may advance some trigger that causes the quiz to become available?

I don't think we ever really figured out what was going on here, but occasionally this issue pops up. Hopefully this helped though?

[Lizwiz]

Thanks for your thoughtful reply.
I've done all the side quests you mentioned and am now almost at the end of the Arvendale main quest.
Will see if I can do the quiz after that.

[Lizwiz]

Well I couldn't do the quiz after Arvendel was destroyed.
But I could do other quests for the Mage Guild at that point so that I could get to level 4 and gain access to other stuff.

[Kale]

Okay, so I futzed around a bit. Essentially, what *should* happen is that a message pops up from Sandra stating that the quiz is ready. This message will only pop up after you have A: asked Sandra about the quiz quest, and B: Recruited Petula. (And technically anything that leads up to recruiting Petula like recruiting Guanida, visiting the Dome, etc.)

Using Pato’s savefile, the message pops up immediately upon meeting both conditions, regardless of the order you do them in. So the question now is what other condition(s?) needs to be met, which were already met in Pato’s savefile by default. Number of kills, number of quest completes, number of hours played, meeting a specific condition, completing a different quest entirely, etc. I'm not sure how anyone would go about figuring that out though, sorry. The mystery remains for another day.

For what it's worth, I don't think you missed anything of any real importance at least.