WCop National vs. Continental Teams & Qualifying

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There is something really wrong with how continental teams work in the Smogon World Cup and this also ties in with the Qualification Format of World Cup as I will elaborte.

At the moment players from nations that have not qualified for the World Cup yet, are able to freely choose wheather to play for their nation or to play for their continent. For example: A player from an established team like Italy would not be able to sign up for Team Europe - this is because it would be unfair to give that player the opportunity to play for 2 teams. However a player from Team Austria can - with the justification that Austria is "not a real team" since they haven't qualified for the main tournament. Team Austria has existed for 5 years tho so that claim is absurd.
This rule is completely unfair for:
  • new teams trying to qualify as it stops their growth or even worse their creation.
  • all other teams in the tournament as certain players from multiple nations can just decide to unite under one banner instead of having to play for their country.
  • all players from other nations who can only sign up and play for one team.
Btw I don't want to blame any of the TDs, continental teams or players for the current situation. There are just certain rules in place that artificially created it. Let's just ask ourselves: What was the reason continental teams like Europe were created in the first place and what is the history behind this? Well the answer is easy: because certain nations did not have enough players. But as soon as they do have enough players there should be no reason for players of that nation to be able to play for the continental team anymore. "Well okay a new team forming? That's nice and all but why do you want to force people to not join with their old team?" Well because it actively represses the growth of teams and sometimes even the formation of a new team. And I can prove it because IT HAS HAPPENED ALREADY.

Nations who said that they are or have been affected by this are: Austria, Belgium, Netherlands, Mexico, Argentinia, Venezuela, China, India, Pakistan and there might be more. Some of the teams mentioned here said that the situation negatively impacted them. From what I have heard, some teams would have been around much earlier if it wasn't for 1 or 2 players not wanting to leave the continental team. Or they have been around but simply got deleted because the team couldn't qualify and 1 or 2 players wanted to have a safe spot next year. The MOST ABSURD thing in fact is that there are currently 3 players who are on Team Europe who have FAILED TO QUALIFY to the tournament with their nation and then decided to GO BACK to play for Team Europe the next year.
And let's not kid ourselves - the players who can choose between Continental and National Team are usually the established key players. Now imagine you prepare for a year with your team and suddenly your two best players simply decide to switch team because they want to have better odds. Or why even try to form a team in the first place if it is just about the growth as an individual and to get accepted on your continental team?
Ofc I am not asking to force players from (for example) Netherlands to form their own team but as i said; as soon as someone signs up as a captain and has enough players, there should be no chance whatsoever for any NL players to be on Team Europe. Imagine if Germany, Italy and France just decided to not form any teams to unite under the banner of Team Europe. Ofc this would not be fair but this is basically what happened on a smaller scale with Team Benelux or am I wrong? And the current rules support this!
The line of reasoning for this was always: "hey its not that deep, its just a game, let people play with their friends" but then with the same argument you should allow teams like Afrabs, Alps, Middle East etc. as well no? If you want to keep your arbitrary group of friends together and play with them do so in SPL, SCL or basically any other tour but not World Cup. Thx. And don't forget: continental teams won't be dead as some will try to claim. This just gives a new opportunity for a fresh collective of European/Asian/Latam players that are not represented to unite under their continental banner.

Disclaimer: I am only posting this out of my own personal opinion. Not all teams quoted have voiced their distaste to the current situation (maybe in fear of creating unnecessary dramas). Which is also why I am making this post -> I don't want other growing teams to split and have beef like how it happened in our team.

Qualifying Format:

I am coming back to my point from before where players who failed to qualify for the WCop have gone back to Team Europe to be able to play the main tournament. Why waste one entire year in prepartation - searching for new players, training them, building etc. just to lose in qualifiers when you could just as easily play the entire tournament by playing for the continental team? To be honest I don't even blame them and that's because the qualifying format is bs:
  • 2018: 5 teams for 1 slot
  • 2020 8 teams for 2 slots
  • 2021: 10 teams for 3 slots
  • 2022: 15 teams for 3 slots
The slots were always too scarce and don't forget that relegated teams have it much easier to qualify again. They get to pick their seeds and have to play less rounds, they can scout your teams but you can't scout theirs + don't forget that rng also plays a role in mons. Then to face strong teams like last years' champion Champions US South. You could literally dedicate one long year to assamble a really strong team and easily lose in qualifiers because of the bad odds, completely losing your motivation for the next year. Also don't get me wrong - I am not crying about having to qualify or things being unfair but you can see that objectively the current format does not promote growth at all. Why would you even try to make a new team with your nation if the odds for qualifying are that low anyways?

Currently there are 28 teams with as I said 15 teams fighting for 3 slots and a qualifying format that once again favors these relegated teams. With 28 teams (+ NL and maybe even others that are dead because of continental teams) the main round could easily be expanded. There are multiple ways how to do it better and I am looking forward to hear some suggestions.
One thing I want to say for sure is that the Qualifiers should be treated as a main part of the tournament and there should be more relegation slots.


Flexibility:


And this ties in with next point: "We will change something next year." But the thing is: NO YOU WON'T because you always say that but it always depends on the # of teams signed up. Maybe the situation next year will be completely different to the situation now so you need to be more flexibile and that might the most important thing you need to implement.
If the year before there were only 18 teams who wanted to play in WCop but the year after there are 30 teams you obviously need to change the number of relegation slots. I remember in 2018 there were 5 teams playing for 1 slot (with the relegated team only playing 1 round and the 4 new teams having to win 3 rounds to qualify) and they didn't want to change the number of slots because "hey last year they didn't know that they should win games in a tournment so we cant have the 14th and 15th have to fight for another slot" and they used the same shitty excuse again year after year. Well maybe it should be apparent that players should actually try to win their tournament games because the number of relegation slots could be changing for next year??? This goes hand in hand with format btw because next year it will be "last year we had x amount of teams but this year if we change the format we don't even know how many teams would signup for a new format so lets not change it" lmao.


Imagine how Smogon WCop could look like if this was implemented in 2018? We might have had a prospering World Cup with already established Teams as Netherlands, Chile, Venezuela, Argentinia, Belgium etc. much much earlier with those players being much more present in today's community as well. And don't make the same mistake this year because we have so many new teams, this could be the chance for something big. Chile, Venezuela, etc. all exist this year but if the circumstances don't change we might as well see the top players move back to team LA next year.

Question to the TDs: What would be wrong about expanding WCop to 20 slots right now and going with it for this year? I am not trying to push drastic changes like that this fast - I am just asking what speaks against it?


tl;dr: bs rules have artificially made it hard for teams to qualify -> made people stick to continental teams like Europe that gave them a pass -> made teams trying to qualify even weaker / stopped them from forming / made them disband -> made it even harder for new teams -> hearts were broken


Pinging the captians of the teams who are affected by this to give their input if they wish to do so:
Jordy Lets In The Sun Flamita So Noisy Mikaav luisin Chiles Habaneros raf fabwooloo Jaajgko elednb Roseybear Gingy One Last Kiss Lyster Enzonana. ACR1 Amir Alpha Rabbit DeepBlueC Charmflash Oshim MaswoodShaheb Eoward AxCypher Vileman Haru Separation ChickWayne
 
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Amaranth

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This is an issue that is extremely dear to me and I've been trying to address for as long as I've been TD.

Some personal takes on the situation (not universally supported by TDs):

I support improving Qualifiers structure rather than expanding main event to 20 or more teams.
Main event already suffers from a gulf in quality between the top and the bottom. Many teams in the top 16 routinely make playoffs, and many teams in the top 16 routinely have to play their way out of relegation. Expanding main event makes this gulf worse, and blowouts just aren't good for anyone. I think we should keep main event WCoP to the traditional 16, it's a great number and it sets up top 8 playoffs nicely, it's an amazing format for all teams with realistic chances of top 8. BUT we need to do something to improve the experience of teams that aren't quite that big.
My personal dream is having a second division that runs parallel to the first division, with relegation/promotion happening at the end of the tournament instead of the start of the next one. Qualifier teams would get a whole actual tournament to prove their worth, and I really think there's no reason they shouldn't have one.
I really strongly believe in this being the future of WCoP. Some elitist will probably go and tell me that having a B-league would be "unhype" or whatever - please shut up, most sports outside the US have B-leagues and they're fantastic for organic growth of new talent, you don't know what you're talking about. They don't need to be high quality and they don't need to be popular with literally everybody on the website to still be worth running. They're extremely hype for the people that do care, and you can just ignore them if you don't.
For bonus points, maybe with a B-league we'd be able to let the top teams field second rosters in it. Allow them to give new talent a chance in a less stressful environment than the main event. I know for a fact at least a few of the biggest nations would put this to good use. But that's looking far into the future.
With all that said, I acknowledge this B-league thing is a radical idea. For 2022, I worked on reaching a middle ground, and give Qualifier teams a Round Robin where they all get to play a decent number of games and don't have to suffer bracket luck as much. I'm delighted this was achieved and I see it as a first step towards bigger things. I think this is already a very good result that addresses a bunch of problems brought up in the op (eg. format favoring the relegated teams by default - this format is neutral to every participating team).

On Continental teams: not a simple issue to solve, at all. They're a necessary evil to ensure everybody has a team they can represent, but they do suffocate new national teams from forming.
I don't support forcing players to break away from continental teams when new national teams are created. The continental teams are established parts of the main event, they have their own communities, they don't deserve being denied the environments they've invested a lot of time into. But I do think that if a new national team is established, new players should flood into that team and not into the continental ones. That seems like the best way to balance not disrupting the currently existing continental teams, without allowing them to suffocate new teams that are trying to be formed.
This in particular is something that needs to be discussed extensively, with the community and internally with other TDs. It's a hard issue and it needs to be addressed.

On Eligibility in general: I think current rules are kind of bad, overly complicated, and strict in the wrong places. People should be able to pick one team they're eligible for, and they should be forced to stick to it (except for serious special circumstances). There's a clear issue with people jumping from team to team depending on which roster they like more; once you lock away that possibility by forcing players to commit to a team permanently, I don't terribly care which team that is.
The current IP-based approach is simple and all, but, to make an example, I've been told of multiple players of African descent that would quite like to represent their home countries but haven't visited them since creating their Smogon account. Now I know verifying these stories is always difficult, but I think ideally it'd be good to allow that sort of thing to happen.
There's probably a healthy middle ground between "only the IPs matter" and "claim whatever eligibility you feel like claiming" that I feel we should be looking to move towards, and locking people on whichever roster they choose would allow us to take these steps more confidently without fearing tournaments being ruined by people choosing to represent a team they have no valid claim to.

Qualifiers needing improvements/restructuring
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Attempting to fix eligibility issues
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(and if you reply "ok this is a lot of words but no action", one, i'd love for you to be in my shoes and try actually doing work for once, and two, this is action, shut up thanks)
 

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Amaranth,

I understand your concerns about “breaking up” continental teams, but the reality is the current rules surrounding these few teams hurts the many potential national teams that could have competitive rosters.

I do not think continental teams should be nuked completely, but I do think current forms of grandfathering should be removed. If team Austria does well this year, Austrian players should not be eligible for team Europe next year, regardless of their previous status. There should be no grandfathering, no historical eligibility, etc for the players in these sorts of situations with continental teams.

If this is not done, the growth these teams experience will continue to be slow. Logically, if other nations/regions had the option to essentially merge due to past Smogon demographics, we would all take it - more countries/regions to choose players from will likely make a better team.

I like the idea of increasing the number of teams in the main event, but only if action is taken on continental teams (LA is included in this even though they are not technically a continental team lol). Given the timing, player eligibility changes would have to happen next year and on. HOWEVER, increasing the main event to 20 could easily happen this year.

I believe continental teams are important to ensure everyone has some means of playing in WCoP. However, when we are artificially propping up a couple teams while deliberately hurting the growth of many others, something is wrong.
 
Specific solutions aside, 15 qualifying teams should be indicative of the fact that something needs to change.

If we have more qualifying teams than “regular” teams, then there are 2 theoretical ways of addressing this.

1) Make it harder to form new teams and have a pre-established list of WCoP teams.

- I’m not pushing for this and I know it’s not popular but it’s technically a solution so I’m gonna mention it.

2) Expand the main event.

- This is realistically what has to happen. Again, more teams qualifying than already in the tour is the biggest red flag that the current system needs fixing.

So, what do we expand to? 20? 24? Something else? I don’t know but the main focus of this thread should be on ironing out this number. We also need to look at the subsequent format ramifications of changing the 16 number. Do people end up playing more than 3 games? Will pools be longer than 3 weeks? etc.

In terms of which teams get to start out in the regular pool of 20/24/? teams, use the previous year’s (qualifying) results. If the expansion is this year, use last year’s results. If the expansion is next year, use this year’s results.
 

Finchinator

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We were able to field four highly competitive US teams last year, including many playoff teams and the eventual winner.

A disproportionately large amount of Smogon comes from that one country. It would be doing a disservice to the US players to condense them to one roster, the community to have many top players have to sit out due to a roster crunch, and the level of competition to have to deal with that team.

I have no comment on 16v20vX right now, but the US should stay separated.
 
We were able to field four highly competitive US teams last year, including many playoff teams and the eventual winner.

A disproportionately large amount of Smogon comes from that one country. It would be doing a disservice to the US players to condense them to one roster, the community to have many top players have to sit out due to a roster crunch, and the level of competition to have to deal with that team.

I have no comment on 16v20vX right now, but the US should stay separated.
Everyone knows this, but that disproportionately large amount of users does not matter when the majority of them do not play tournaments and are probably bots and or inactive. It is irrelevant if your country has 100k or 1k users on the site if you are able to field a competitive roster to sign up for. 4 teams is excessive, no matter how you look at it. It is literally 1/4 of the total teams playing. US isn't the only country that can split into more than 1 competitive roster, so I really do not get why they are treated as an exception.
 

Finchinator

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Everyone knows this, but that disproportionately large amount of users does not matter when the majority of them do not play tournaments and are probably bots and or inactive. It is irrelevant if your country has 100k or 1k users on the site if you are able to field a competitive roster to sign up for. 4 teams is excessive, no matter how you look at it. It is literally 1/4 of the total teams playing. US isn't the only country that can split into more than 1 competitive roster, so I really do not get why they are treated as an exception.
I have nothing against other countries being able to sign up with multiple teams based on geography if there is enough evidence that it is warranted. It currently has not been presented as such, but I don’t see any issue with people trying and that changing (that’s my personal opinion, not representative of the TD team).

The US having four teams is not excessive though. Even if you don’t care about the raw numbers of users (or active users, which >1/4 of are from the US), the US has had 3-4 competitive teams for as long as most people on here can remember, even during the years where Metro or Central really bottomed out. You are trying to fix something that is not broken.
 

Quite Quiet

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I don't think the current format of WCoP support adding the number of teams that are showing up each year. Doesn't matter if we're doing 20 or 24 teams, we end up in the same situation with loads of qualifying teams regardless. Not that I don't want those new teams; they aren't the problem themselves, just a consequence of the current format. Rather than trying to force the current format to support the number of teams we seems to be getting it might be a better idea to make up something new.

TIN wants a B-league, that could fit loads more teams than the current format and wouldn't leave (new) teams stuck doing nothing after a single week of playing just because their first week of qualifiers went badly. You could probably for B teams from established countries inside of this too. If they aren't taking up spots from other countries and we can get more than a single week's playing time for all of the teams that's probably a good time for that as well.

Or there's this:
Adamant: 30 teams -> top8 of last year alrdy qualified
bottom 8 (of last year) + 14 others play it out for the rest => 4 groups of 5/6 teams and top2 get into main round
Point being, current format is not flexible at all when WCoP is a tour that should have more flexibility in its format than it currently does. At least that's what all the qualifying teams are proving year after year.
 
I would like for someone to give me a logical explanation on why the United States are allowed to have 4 teams despite being 1 country, and the rest of teams are not.
Because doing otherwise would be a disservice to both them and everyone else. To them, because it means that a large portion of the site would be unable to participate in the tournament despite having the requisite skills; there are a handful of other countries that experience something similar, but nothing on the same level, and to be honest it's still somewhat of an issue with the status quo of four teams.
And for all the other teams, the US teams are already some of the best in the pool. As things stand, other countries are able to match up to that, but it's not an easy task and an amalgam US superteam would be able to grab all the best players from its constituent teams in one lineup. Even the best teams would struggle to beat that, and a lot of otherwise viable teams we want to support would find themselves with essentially no chance justfrom signups, which is unfun.
 

termi

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What exactly is the issue with 1 team per country, the way every other team sports world cup does things? Why resort to convoluted and arbitrary metrics as well as blatant American favoritism (America doesn't field multiple teams in the basketball world cup either, does it?) when a much simpler rule already used by tournaments in just about every branch of competitive team sports exists?
 

ausma

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We were able to field four highly competitive US teams last year, including many playoff teams and the eventual winner.

A disproportionately large amount of Smogon comes from that one country. It would be doing a disservice to the US players to condense them to one roster, the community to have many top players have to sit out due to a roster crunch, and the level of competition to have to deal with that team.

I have no comment on 16v20vX right now, but the US should stay separated.
I'm not really much of a tour player and don't really have much to add regarding specific nation vs continental qualifications, but I did want to add my 2 cents about merging US regions from the perspective of a newer tournament player from the US.

Like what Finchinator said, a core issue with merging US slots is that doing so feels entirely dismissive of just how large the US is, and just how much of the userbase is (and will be) from there. You would really be mitigating opportunities for clearly potent, more seasoned players and new players alike given the scale of the US, which creates a level of slot competition that is incredibly disproportionate and frankly unhealthy for US players, ultimately pressuring and severely stagnating team synergy/growth. More specifically, the extremely competitive roster slots really dice team synergy due to volatile and likely rapidly shifting slots, greatly damaging team synergy.

With that in mind, another major concern I have is that, due to the sheer volume of higher level players, merging the US teams effectively means that new blood is going to be phased out much more decisively considering the scale of the US as a whole. After all, there's no real reason to entertain new blood if every single slot can be consistently filled by already established, strong players around the country, including sub slots. While that may not seem as large of a concern, it does mean regions growing and fostering potential in new players, which is instrumental for a long-term, yearly team tour as more new players show up, is almost entirely out of the equation. This really puts every player, old and new, in the US in a terrible, very unfair situation and shuts down a lot of ways that players and the team as a whole would grow and improve organically.

For those reasons and others ones already mentioned, there certainly is no US favoritism, either; if a region is large scale enough it feels pretty clear that it should also have cut up teams to account for size and player volume, and that should definitely also apply to any non-US region. The US teams have felt very self sufficient, leveled, and as Finchinator said, there's no reason really to merge them if they've worked. Don't fix what isn't broken.
 

Hipmonlee

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A two tier World Cup would be amazing. Lets definitely do that!

I think the solution to the continental teams problem is to just allow people to have the option to join more than one team. And allow players to form any team they can, provided it makes some geographic sense, and is not obviously broken (like a north-america team).

So if a Texas team wants to split off from South, and they have the players to do it, then let them go for it. Why not?

If Austrian players prefer to play under a Europe banner, who cares? Just let people play the way they want to play. If they want to betray their country for a faint chance of a couple of pixels, then let them.

The important thing about the world cup is that your team is consistent across years (and multiple tournaments). The country thing is just a convenient gimmick to make it work. Trying too hard to enforce strict adherence to country guidelines misses the point entirely.

This doesnt really benefit anyone because now anyone can form a new team. If I am not making the cut for Oceania I could put together a New Zealand team. Maybe a bunch of Sicilian players could break away from Italy or something.

With a two tier competition, you run qualifiers for the lower division among all the new teams. Then the new teams have to get promotion from the lower division before they can reach the higher division. People arent really incentivised to create new teams on a whim, they have to commit to them for at least two years if they are gonna get a trophy out of it.

And you have the one year stand down before you can leave one pre-existing team and join another.

Also let people play for places they dont live provided they have a meaningful connection to it. Yes people will lie. If I had to answer to save my life, do I believe Zerowing was born in Guam? No. But who really cares? When you catch people lying, tourban them and remove their trophies. It's not that big of a deal.
 
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Agree w abr's sentiments and I'm writing this just to throw out a proposal. However I don't think this should happen this year/at all if there is serious interest and consideration in bringing old gens/10 slot back for next year. Likely we'd just have another thread next year lol.. but if we expand this year, I assume that would most likely be the end of old gens. Most of these new teams wouldn't field real rosters with old gens in a tour so going to 20/24 and then going back to 16 or making teams field random ass rosters or whatever to play again next year would be pretty pointless.

I think expansion should definitely be to 20 teams if anything. 24 is way too many teams to go to in one go. 20 teams with 4 groups of 5. Top 2 make it to the playoffs and the bottom team in each group gets relegated. Group standings are decided by pools and everyone plays 4 games instead of 3 in 3 weeks. Really no need at all to add on another week for one extra game. Regular tiebreaks if teams are tied for 2nd or 5th. I assume ties would be pretty common for 2nd but it'd only add on one week to the tour so that's not an issue. Quarterfinals would be Group 1 vs Group 4 1v2 and 2v1 and the same with Groups 2 and 3. Do a random draw for groups with a set time on stours, maybe stream it on twitch or something. Would be pretty hype ala champions league.
Expanding a little bit is infinitely better than a relegation system with a lower league. Letting people play for places they don't live/have never lived is the dumbest thing ever
 
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Isa

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Also let people play for places they dont live provided they have a meaningful connection to it. Yes people will lie. If I had to answer to save my life, do I believe Zerowing was born in Guam? No. But who really cares? When you catch people lying, tourban them and remove their trophies. It's not that big of a deal.
nah dont revert to this. this being the de facto rule for several years completely shattered the integrity of wcop and it took a lot of effort to rebuild. a lot of claims are impossible to verify, as you allude to. we'd very likely see a great rise in strong players from weak regions shift their allegiances to wherever they have a clique of friends that are also likely to win those pixels. Pixels Matter, people will do this. don't loosen allegiance rules or we'll return to the wild wild west of early wcop.
 

Hipmonlee

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nah dont revert to this. this being the de facto rule for several years completely shattered the integrity of wcop and it took a lot of effort to rebuild. a lot of claims are impossible to verify, as you allude to. we'd very likely see a great rise in strong players from weak regions shift their allegiances to wherever they have a clique of friends that are also likely to win those pixels. Pixels Matter, people will do this. don't loosen allegiance rules or we'll return to the wild wild west of early wcop.
Early WCOP was great, everyone loved that tournament.

Players shifting around is only an issue if you make it an issue. If people commit to the team for the long term, strictness about eligibility really doesnt matter. That's what this tournament is about, not jingoism.

Also IP Geolocation is a ridiculously over-technical solution to a non technical problem, that is forcing particular decisions around what teams can be included because they have to match the technical solution.

[edit] - Like, I think I would be eligible to play for Netherlands in the FIFA world cup, but not the Pokemon world cup. It's a bit OTT...
 
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