if youre gonna do it that way you should probably have a whole team fight instead of a bo3, since the consequences are so large.
Not saying that we should just do things because that's how we've always done them, but this is literally how we conducted the 16th team placement last year
http://www.smogon.com/forums/threads/the-world-cup-of-pokémon-x-sign-ups-read-posts-476-492-505.3539669/page-20#post-6262988 and I don't think anyone batted an eye.
Everybody is riled up because Afrabs and Asia might not be teams in the future, but the real kicker to me is that everyone has so little faith that those regions wouldn't be able to form a team in the future because "so many live in Europe/US." I mean, 5 years ago the thought of a Team Greece being in WCoP would have been laughable at best, and here we have a team seriously vying for entry in both last year's and this year's WCoP. There's a good chunk of current players that live within the Afrab and Asian regions as it is, so I have faith we'll be seeing them for years to come.
I get that tradition has such a strong pull on the community as regards to the teams that should be in WCoP, and that team rivalries exist and stuff and have for a long time (some going back to 2005 even), I and the other TDs are not blind to that.
But, we wanted to legitimize a portion of the tournament that has always been obtusely shady in comparison to the other tournaments here on the forum, so we took a route that will hopefully counteract that shadiness to not only make our lives easier, but remove one of the most contentious parts of the tournament in legitimizing on what teams the "top players" should be playing on.
Maybe last year's team locking would have been enough to counteract this problem without introducing the IP rule this year, maybe not, kinda tough to say really. But in the long run I feel logistically this rule will make the tournament run far smoother than it has in the past at the expense of breaking with tradition a bit in the present.