Wanted to clarify a few things Rushan said but bolded some things I agree with to avoid repeating too much
Dim, Ray, Wolfey, Yoshi, and Huy have all written up stuff.
This is false. Aside from the fact that none of the Top 8 American players (Ray, Wolfey, Enfuego, sandman) interact much on Smogon is the fact that the US is actually pretty broken up when it comes to practice circles. Unless I'm mistaken, the Spanish or Japanese probably have the largest single training group.
What I think needs to be done is people playing against more good opponents. Ray, TTS, and skarm went over to Japan and played their great players and learned more from that one tournament than they did in weeks of random practice. If Europe decided to just practice with each other, it would be great for the British, French, and Italians (in general, I know those countries have individual standouts as well) but I think Germany and Spain aren't gaining much. They need to play more with the International community like the US and Japan. Because right now, the US is far ahead of the rest of us.
Little Representation because that's how much was awarded. South Korea only has a <13 and >13 division. Sejun did amazing for his first year in Masters. Making Top Cut and losing to Wolfe is not a poor accomplishment by any means. Jumpei and Satoru were also great players. 2 of the 3 Masters players from Asia top cut so I'm not sure what you mean by "almost everybody was eliminated in the swiss round."
Japan had a terrible qualification method for their Nationals this year requiring players to place well in their WiFi tournament to enter. For some reason only 2 spots were granted in each age division. That's right. 2 players from Japan, region-locked, and need to do well on WiFi to enter. Europe got 4 from each country with no region-lock and open invites.
I wonder if that charming 10th place dude has a warstory written for that site his asshole friends haven't published for like a week now. brb making another splinter
sandman is still a mod here so that part is a little misleading (though obviously if you kept going Huy and I wouldn't have anything nice to say about Smogon at 9 and 10 and I don't think Manoj particularly uses it either, to round out the 4-2s Americans) but yeah, can safely say Smogon had 0 impact on any success anyone from the US had this year.
The comment on the Japanese is why I'm posting, though: it's not like they have one giant community either, but they're definitely a lot more structured than most of the rest of us. At least as far as I understand it, there are multiple large circles of players (evidently all larger than the core of the Skarmbliss/NuggetBridge clique) that play together often, mostly in real life meetups. I expected Worlds to go how it did this year (outside of Satoru having a rough showing relative to what I figured he'd do; he didn't have much time to practice apparently and was using the same team he won Nationals with, so not very surprising how that ended up), but moving forward, assuming Japan gets a better qualification system and more spots -- and if they don't it would be a crime -- I feel like it's going to go back to being really difficult for the rest of us to compete with Japan reliably doing what we are now, which was sort of "the point" with NB for me. I can't speak for how the Euroepans are doing it, but most of us in North America at least tend to have small little 4-10 person social circles we work with and then don't really share ideas beyond that either through team building or tournaments people are actually trying to win in with the rest of the community outside of Nationals and Worlds.
This is unlike the tournaments the groups in Japan have, where at least based on the group Ray, Mike, Danny, and dtrain met, a couple times a month the people in the group are competing in tournament with each other actually giving it an honest effort every time they show up and are battling in a sort of serious environment much more frequently than we are because of it. I think a lot of it is some level of cultural difference there since no one here really gives a shit if they win anything other than the official events for VGC(even Smogon's tournament was kind of a joke even when people still gave even the slightest fuck about Smogon) vs. the people they met in Japan who actually cared about winning their tournaments when they got together. Obviously we can't get by with a bunch of real life meet-ups like they can based on geography even in just the US, let alone when you start looking at the other countries this part of the community tends to be comprised of, but we can all definitely battle and work together more and make more of an effort to learn from each other. This is kind of the point of the NB tournament system once we get it going, need to try to incentivize people to put some effort into moving the metagame along and helping each other get better earlier in the year. I think everyone tends to think they can just get it done on their own or with their friends or whatever, and when everyone else is playing the same game, sure, by default someone doing that will win, but I think it's gonna get hard fast starting with Worlds next year and we should all be ready for it. If the Europeans think it's better to work within Europe than with us, that's their decision and they can see how it plays out, though like Rushan said, I'm a little sketchy on the value of that for the Germans and Spaniards since other than Zog and Matty being the exception for their countries there hasn't been much incentive for them to work with anyone else to this point.
I think people are underestimating the Japanese a lot(I don't want to comment on Korea because so far all we have for a sample there is Sejun, who is a great player, but it is silly to base an opinion on a country off of one player). While they've all gotten better since then, Ray, Danny, Mike, and dtrain got glomped pretty good when they played against the Japanese guys a few months ago, with even the lesser players in that tournament picking up wins against the North American guys. Those aren't weak players from NA, obviously, with Ray's resume speaking for itself, Danny having gotten World invites from US Nats 3 years in a row, Skarm doing decently in Worlds in 2010 and 2012, and even dtrain would have been in Worlds this year if he'd beaten me in the last round of the LCQ this year. There are a lot of strong players over there, more than anyone seems to realize, and a good chunk of elite players, too. We aren't as big of fish in the Pokemon sea as everyone seems to think, both in the US and Europe. I would advise people not to get overconfident looking toward 2013.