not to beat a dead horse but i wanna give my opinions as manager (and also some opinions as a current host of a world cup), not as 1v1 staff.
i would really like to emphasize more what some people said about lost heros' control over the tournament and luser's lack thereof.
this is, in my opinion, a tremendous mismanagement by the staff team and it shouldn't just go over as a slap on the wrist like a "oh just don't do this again". lost heros, as a Tournament Director, should have
some overseeing in case things go wrong, like it happened here, but that's it. however they should be delegating this role to (the non-participant) Felucia, who isn't playing this iteration, whose injury is currently healing well at the moment and who could still write with her left hand in case of emergencies.
as for luser, it would seem that they're still trying to give him perms to write in locked threads (such as admin decisions), and ss has yet to respond, so this would be yet another callout for them to please do it.
furthermore i'd like to discuss SS7, a decision that was mostly made with the SS mainers in mind, and not the rest of new SS players or the WC managers. this is curious, i'm not necessarily against the decision because there was a loud call for it, however it undermines the deeper issue which is that this makes it more difficult for newer teams (ej. china, france, brazil, mexico) due to the logistics of having to build even more teams for their non-mainers. france has two known mainers in akeras and cdlc, none of which know that much about ss, and brazil has scizor boladao, and while he has good records, he isn't known for being an ss builder.
the creation of westral is whatever to me, superteams occur all the time, this just happens to be a different kind of superteam that's just way stronger than it probably should be (cuz we already have superteams like us south with pqs chimes squirtell itchy bird tort etc), central didn't have enough signups and there wasn't really any other way to go about it, some people suggested hosts made central + canada but that would make stuff more complicated fnr imo.
finally, i think regions getting revealed before signups is absolutely okay, the issue is the timing. you can't do it 3 days before deadline, you'd have to do it around a week before deadline and ask people to sign up quickly (also reveal captains quickly so people know who to ask when doing tryouts n other stuff), this is seen in many wcs but lost heros emphasized lcwc as a joke (i think??????) and i thought that was pretty weird so i put my opinion on it and then i got called dumb for not getting a joke.
aside from that, well, it's sunday so obviously the tour's not gonna get canceled, so yeah, that's about it for me.
last minute addressing felucia's recent announcement.
Captains not showing up for draft
I ain't making the rules for this but we are in dire need of a protocol for this scenario...
my fault chat, i mean yeah we had to improvise for ogpl3 but i don't think it ended up hurting the tour overall.
In general, prospective teams should be decided by the host at least a week before signups close. They may or may not publish these, but it's important that regions aren't split too close to signups closing to make it harder to arbitrarily split teams for balance reasons
correct! this is what i was talking about earlier in 1v1cord and usually a standard for other wcs such as (the previously mentioned) lcwc and (the one i'm hosting) rcop.
Then when signups close teams from the prospective list (which should have more than 12 teams btw) can be merged until there are 12 left, prioritising making sure that all teams can at least field a roster.
ideally this could be done earlier but i understand if it can't, in rcop 2025 for example we couldn't field europe or latam teams so we had the few signups that existed join neighboring countries (ej. colombians were asked to join venezuela, i think people from sweden were asked to join either uk, netherlands, or germany).
btw regarding what i said in 1v1cord about the signups into round 1 lasting 2 weeks instead of 3, i don't agree with that mindset anymore given that for rcop specifically the issue was that we were doing the qualifying rounds first and that's why we did 2 weeks of signups.
Yes, this means strong teams can be formed if a region happens to get a lot of signups, but that's the nature of world cup and I really don't think anyone should have the authority to arbitrarily decide a team is "too strong" and "nerf" it.
about time somebody said it, yes, teams get tons of signups and superteams happen, but that's just the nature of the game, if you don't like it don't play the tour, the issue would be if a superteam gets unintentionally structured by the hosting team, which is what happened with asia + pacific in wc7 and now is going on with west + central.
also i didn't feel like replying to it all since i have to go but i like the 2026 circuit idea.
ok that's it cya.