Since a lot of people seem very confused about a lot of things, I'll post a rundown of the philosophies we have stuck to so far:
On: Eligibility
People are eligible for any nation for which they have hard evidence of a connection in the form of IPs for a prolonged amount of time.
The exact amount of time is 1. not public to prevent exploits and 2. subject to some wiggle room at the discretion of the host teams for an unofficial tournament such as this. It's somewhere between 1-12 months.
We do not accept "cultural similarity" or "my grandma is from that place" or "I live 30 minutes from the border" or any other such things, because they are arbitrary. The moment you implement an arbitrary ruleset, bad faith actors will come out to squeeze it for as much as they can, as phoopes has found out within 2 days of being a new World Cup host on this godforsaken website. (I am not referring to the complex oligen1 case, which btw has some legitimacy now as he has real French IPs!, but to some inane private requests that phoopes has received recently. These inane requests and complaints are the rule rather than the exception, any time you set flexible eligibility rules.)
So, although IP identification has its limits and flaws, it has a LONG history of being the only reasonable way to have something that at least resembles a fair and objective method of assigning each player to their country.
I don't really have a way to prove this other than to tell you to look at every single time alternatives were tried, and issues sprouted up without fail. I promise you that there is no better way to go about this than sticking to IP and only IP, believe me, we have tried everything else before.
On: Continental / "Bucket" teams
We believe that when all is said and done, and the team list is finalized, every player regardless of where they reside should be theoretically eligible for one of them.
Generally this comes in the form of a Continental Team. As a baseline, this is a good solution that allows loads of players to play for teams that they feel they represent (Latin America, Asia, Oceania) with more consistent participation opportunities than if they were forced to either play for their national team or give up.
This is not the only possible solution, but it is generally the most stable one. It simply does well in achieving its proposed goal. However, RBYWC in particular has encountered two of its potential flaws in a very real way.
Flaw One: "Rest of the World"
Sometimes, even the continental team doesn't have enough players to form. This was the case for Asia AND Latin America AND Europe last year. This would have resulted in a sizeable number of players being completely unable to participate, so we took the measure of establishing the rather controversial team Rest of the World.
You can have your valid reasons to dislike it - there's practically zero cultural similarity if you put a Greek, a Brazilian, a Belgian, a Swede, a Colombian, and an Indian in a room. I obviously understand this. I just also believe it would have been undesirable to rule out all of these very real players from our tournament in principle, which would have been the only alternative. If you think they should just not be allowed to participate instead, that's reasonable, and we can hear how the community feels about that overall.
A secret third alternative is to allow all these "one-off from a random country" guys to play for whatever team is 'culturally closest' to them, arbitrarily settled by the host. So I guess send the Colombian and Brazilian with teams Mexico or Argentina? The Greek with Italy, the Belgian with France? Something like that? It's not crazy, and it's a solution I have tried in RCoP last year. It worked okay.
But I do think ultimately, having a strong LatAm, Asia, and Europe to work as a catch-all for these people is better than having people play for nations that they... quite simply don't belong to. That is the ideal state of this tournament IMO - no Rest of the World, no "refugees" going to loosely nearby national teams.
Due to unusual participation numbers, and a lot of last-minute changes from what we thought would happen (namely all of LatAm/Asia/Europe failing to form altogether!), we ended up with Rest of the World in RBYWC III. It was an obviously unideal solution, but still better than out-and-out excluding all these players. If you disagree, or if you want to strongly argue for a change from the status quo / general philosophy that I have just described, please voice your opinions in reply.
Flaw Two: "Iberia" / "Spain + Portugal" / "Europe Southwest"
When a national team does not meet the minimum numbers to participate (8 players), they are normally redirected to their respective continental team.
When one country has
just under the minimum number of players - say, 7 strong Spaniards and no more - we reach an awkward spot where if we were to redirect them to Team Europe, the resulting team would look very little like "Europe", and very much like "Spain + a couple random fillers plucked out of the rest of the continent". This would not Feel Good.
I know this because I have hosted many World Cups outside of RBY over the years, wherein team Europe was more of a "Team Netherlands + a couple random fillers" situation, and that was very controversial too.
With Spain and Portugal perpetually in this state where their strong players would monopolize Team Europe, I was posed with two practical options:
(1) Follow standard protocol - they can't stand their own, so they go to Team Europe. Maybe this is acceptable, but in practice it seems like this would have actually effectively removed the rest of Europe from the competition, with Spain+Portugal having more than enough to cross the 8 player threshhold between the two.
(2) Create a special "bucket team" for Spain+Portugal, while retaining the rest of Europe as its own team, too.
I went for Option 2, because I value the existence of Team Europe on its own (or at least the possibility... we saw that they failed to form on their own last year, too, but it was hard to predict they would struggle that much. Still a good number of players was able to participate through RoW, though of course that is separately unideal - read the Flaw One paragraph).
I thought it was preferrable to have Spain+Portugal and Europe as separate teams, to allow more players a chance to participate in our tournament, as opposed to forcing Spain+Portugal to become Team Europe and essentially monopolize it. (Or I guess duopolize it.) I still wanted up and comers from other European countries to have their chance to make a team and give it a shot, without having to fight with the Spain+Portugal numbers.
This is the process under which we arrived at Spain+Portugal's existence. NOT a strong belief in "cultural similarity", not "competitiveness", not "balancing the teams", none of the utter nonsense that has been posted in this thread.
You can take issue with one or several of the steps in this process - this is fine, certainly many of them are subjective decisions - but PLEASE understand what is actually going on before posting.
How do we solve the flaws?
So the funny thing about these two flaws is that they came about as a result of comically unlucky circumstances. Teams with just the wrong number of players, the entirety of MULTIPLE continental teams suddenly going missing from one year to the next, none of these things were ever likely to happen at all. This general philosophy to host tournaments works elsewhere on Smogon, and hell, has worked in former RBYWCs too. It is really just unlucky that the circumstances generated so many spots of awkwardness and confusion over the last edition in particular.
These problems very easily could solve themselves: it seems LatAm and Asia intend to form on their own this year, removing the need for Rest of the World. Awesome!
As for Spain + Portugal, I have no earthly idea what's going on this year, due to severe mixed messages from various representatives of these regions, but it's entirely possible they could stand on their own, and it's also entirely possible they will drop to a less problematic number of members in a way that will let them participate in regular old team Europe without monopolizing it. I don't know yet. The problem may fix itself and return within the normal systems that we have to handle such situations.
It is also possible that these problems will present themselves again though, and it's reasonable to suggest solutions if that is to be the case again. This thread has been rather confused but I will say I've seen one or two salvageable and potentially useful ideas to that end. Maybe this post will clarify the situation and lead to further progress, who knows.
Regardless, I will say I am highly confident in this process despite unfortunate circumstances which have exposed its flaws. Above all, I am unconvinced that any alternative is superior: I do not want to fully exclude players from smaller countries who can't make full teams (as Peasounay suggests), and I certainly do not want to humor a magic wonderland where everyone claims they strongly feel like they belong to Nation X and they become eligible for it, as others have suggested.
These philosophies have worked for me and the communities I've been in, over and over again, and I fully stand behind them. I acknowledge their flaws and shortcomings (no format comes without flaws and shortcomings!) and I am willing to amend said philosophies if the community expresses a clear desire for different solutions.
Appendix: The United States Situation
Smogon is overwhelmingly dominated by the United States userbase. Every single world cup I've seen hosted on this website in the last 20 years finds it necessary to dilute the US player pool in at least two teams, usually all the way up to four. This is for purely practical reasons - the tournament is a better experience if there isn't a single US superteam constantly at the top, and giving more spots to US players just makes sense when so much of your theoretical playerbase is from that one nation.
RBY, for some reason, has always had this US dominance slightly undertuned by comparison. Many would correctly argue that the US is not even the #1 nation in competitive RBY history overall. But it still feels undesirable to cut out dozens and dozens of signups by merging everyone into a single US team.
Personally (and Smogon broadly agrees!) I believe it is worth it to make an exception to the philosophies that we use to otherwise determine our teams, and feature
at least two US teams in our tournament. While the top end for the US may look similar to other participating nations, the depth is truly incomparable, and I hate to cut out all of these users in principle. This is not too controversial with the community broadly, but some people do disagree and I want to acknowledge that before moving on.
There is a further point of debate though: once you agree on whether the US should split or not, you also need to agree on
how to split it. How many teams? 2, 3, 4? And where are the lines? Luckily, Smogon has agreed on this beforehand, and has drawn a Cool Map :tm: for us to use, based on various real world geographical/cultural/etc considerations.
It is clear that US Northeast is in a healthy state as a region that can easily stand on its own and has no huge reason to be disrupted. It is less clear what to do with the other three regions - they are usually competitive across other World Cups, but unusually struggle in RBY specifically. Last year, none of them met the minimum threshold to sign up individually (once again, 8 player minimum), hence "Rest of the US" was born.
I do not think Rest of the US is an ideal place for our tournament to be. I really believe it would be ideal for there to be at least 3 US teams (with one more of the other three regions standing on its own and the other two merging if they really need it), and preferrably to have these teams be stable and consistent year-to-year as opposed to constantly changing arrangements based on who's having a good year and who's having a bad one.
But all of this strife should be contested against the reason we're fracturing the US in the first place: supposedly "excessive playerbase depth". While Northeast is
still by itself the deepest region in RBYWC, the rest of the US is clearly not spoilt with the same riches, with all three teams individually failing to form! So do we really need to split beyond the 2nd team when this is the state of things?
This is the reasoning that lead to "US Northeast" / "Rest of the US" being the two US teams last year. Yes, RoUS is a ridiculous team, but it reflects a ridiculous playerbase distribution within the country that we can't do much about - somewhat similarly to how Spain and Portugal both had sizable participation numbers but just
not quite enough to stand on their own.
My hope and belief is that each of the standard 4 US Regions can grow its own playerbase and return to standing on its own ASAP. I am not opposed to merges - even stupid-sounding ones like RoUS - during the transition years while we work on that goal. If the community feels differently and wants to suggest something else - either philosophically to handle the entirety of the US, or practically with regards to how to handle when the US regions fail to form on their own - by all means share.
I am also open to revising our handling of the US to a new standard with 2 or 3 teams, drawn with our own RBY-community-specific lines, rather than aiming to reach the Smogon standard of the 4 US teams as drawn on the map above.
I do not think revising the US to 1 team would be wise given the extremely healthy state of US Northeast's playerbase, but am open to that too if there is a meaningful community push for it.
In summary
We have systems that are Broadly Good and proven to work. Those systems have ran into some really inconvenient edge cases that exposed some of their flaws last year - this is unlucky, but (1) not that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things, and (2) in my opinion, still preferrable to alternatives.
If you think up a great alternative system to handle ANY of the issues outlined in this post (or hell, any issues you see with RBYWC at all), then please go ahead and voice your opinion. I am constantly looking for ways to improve this tournament, even now that I am taking a step back from officially hosting it, and truly want nothing more than whatever satisfies the community the most.
Finally and in conclusion: I swear to god if you post something that shows that you have not read and understood this post in full I will crash out. I have already crashed out privately over this thread but I will do it again publicly.
