In all honesty, I'm really disappointed with how the draft turned out. Not only did these tiers get shunned from Official tournament representation because the playerbase is "too weak" or because of one reason or another, but when this tournament comes around, it's turned into a giant meme because of this draft. Drafting 33 players for a team that requires 8 slots to play is flat out retarded. Not only that, but it over inflated the entire auction as there was less upbidding / people going for less which means every team had an absurdly high amount of cash.
Hey Teddeh. I am sorry that you feel this way, but I just want to respond to a few bits I disagree with. First and foremost, I do acknowledge that it is unfortunate that these tiers, besides Monotype for the time being (just my personal opinion and subject to change), did not get included in the big tournaments. With that said, I think it is something that should be taken with a genuine understanding that it is not easy to cater to every single tier/playerbase and sometimes not everyone can be pleased -- it was not merely because playerbases were "too weak" or "one reason or another" as you state it to be.
Going on to the next topic I would like to address, drafting 33 players for an 8 slot tournament is indeed unorthodox and not actually an optimal strategy -- I will be the first to acknowledge the latter, too. With that said, the general concept of drafting a lot of players is not and we have a lot of motivated players who otherwise would not be involved with the tournament and I think that this support and our motivation as a group will correlate to surprising amounts of success in the coming weeks. Finally, you mentioned something about price inflation for the other five teams, but I fail to see this as a worry seeing as people like FLCL, who had the best overall year in individual tournaments last year, went for a mere 9k -- less than the average player if you were to buy the minimum. I think that the overall pricing was fine if you compare it to like auctions and our potential impact on this was minimal.
edit: apparently I misconstrued what you meant, but I mean honestly I think that prices were fairly normal, as I said, and our impact was minimal --
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But the worst part of it all is how anyone who has spent any time dedicated to this tour now feels (or at least I feel) that 1/6 of the teams isn't going to take it seriously which generally puts the whole atmosphere of the tournament in the shitter.
I'm sorry, but who suggested we were not going to be taking this seriously? We already have over 4k messages in our team chat and every member is actively posting here, as you can see in this thread, and on Discord. We have a motivated group who will take week-to-week preparation and gameplay as seriously as possible. I cannot assure you that we will win, but we will give our best effort and I feel like we have a lot of underrated prospects that can make it work. I would appreciate if you did not judge our team before seeing how we perform.
From a PU standpoint, we were kicked out of grand slam, not included in snake draft (a lower tiers designed tour), then when we finally get a semi respectable tournament for our playerbase to shine in, 2 SPL managers decide it'll be a fun idea to draft the most amount of people possible and have a laugh and a joke. It's just set a sour tone for the entire tournament now.
Again, I disagree with how you are viewing things and think you are deflecting a lot of sentiments that are related to other parts of the tournament community onto this thread here. I hope that PU and its playerbase has great fortune and representation in the near future -- I have no reason to wish otherwise and we even drafted a number of new and old PU players, as you can see. I think that you should just do your best for your team like everyone else and let us do the same -- you might be surprised as to how enjoyable this tournament will be!