What I am seeing a lot of in this thread is people who are entering this tour with a loser's mindset. They are acting like the result of this WC is a foregone conclusion, so they may as well direct the energy that normally goes into building up players and teams towards the far more productive activity of complaining about how stacked the odds are against them. While I could easily point out the plethora of previous 1v1 team tours where the "worse" team on paper ends up winning, everybody commenting in this thread has been playing longer than me and should really already know that. Instead I'd rather direct this post mostly at deg, who is the only person in this thread who has made anything resembling a serious argument.
We are hardly unique as far as strong WC teams go. I won't lie and say we aren't, on paper, a very good looking team (else I'd also be falling into the doomerism that seems to be plaguing the rest of the community) but I should remind you that teams like 2021 & 2022 Central, 2023 APAC (you should be familiar with this one), and SEU literally whenever were all without weak slots. This is also not the correct use of gerrymandering (there was no manipulation of the US regions to secretly buff US West, neither team could field a roster at the time the merger was announced) but that's mostly semantics.
I appreciate that you're actually offering solutions, but none of them are that great. Removing the newcomer teams is antithetical to the spirit of WC, and I'm also unsure how this factors in to USWC (maybe I'm misinterpreting this?). I am of the opinion that an extra play-ins round would drag the tour out longer that it really needs to be because I do enjoy that WC is a more brief tour than PL, which also fits its identity as a less serious tournament (predetermined teams, no CA prize). Again, I am unsure how this relates to the topic at hand.
As far as splitting West and Central goes, this is also impossible. At the time of writing this post (after signups have closed) US Central has 12 signups (crucify and zio added since they didn't seem to make it on the sheet).
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MAGATRUMP20242024 does not actually reside within the boundaries of US Central, that leaves them with 11 players. This includes those that joined and were last seen on the same day in September 2025, and crucify, who was rather vocal about wanting to support and not take up space on the roster. This leaves the only possible solution to be redrawing US regions 6 days before the pools phase of the tour is set to officially start. This is assuming that all of the tournament directors can agree on this course of action and draw up a map of the US arbitrarily divided into 3 equal regions with at most simple majority support from the residents of the United States. Every day that this fails to happen is one day less that captains will be able to redraft rosters, plan slots, and schedule time in the next several weeks that they'll need to support slots because they lost players they were counting on. This is ignoring the fact that it is impossible to redraw US regions in a way that is even vaguely satisfying to all parties involved, because how are you going to decide where in the midwest that US East ends and US West begins? Does US South get Missouri and Kansas? Do they get Ohio? Why should they get all the good SV players from Central? Well US East could use a good BW player, let's just give them whatever state crucify is in. Oh whoops now West is down a captain, oh well. This is real gerrymandering, and the process of reaching even a mildly satisfying conclusion would genuinely push this tournament back weeks.
The fact of the matter is at the time of the USWC merge, West and Central were the weakest US regions, and it wasn't really close. South and East had and still have extremely competitive teams, and I would go so far as to say East has the strongest SV in the tour (it's 4 slots by the way!). It was a bad idea to announce regions before signups closed, and I will be the first to say that I hate edging signups to try and manipulate your way into a better team, because I think it shows an extreme lack of competitive spirit. I can also say, on behalf of the players of USWC, that is not what happened here. The influx of people signing up did so because they wanted to play with their friends and were given the opportunity, and the West half of those signups were people who responded with a range of "no" to "LOL" to outright ghosting me when I asked if they would signup for this WC. There was no plotting involved. Do I think this should happen again? Probably not, and I'm glad the hosts acknowledged that mistake and have promised it won't occur in future iterations of the tour. But do I think USWC should be split up for being a strong team? No. Not for something that other regions have been guilty of for years in a row, and not less than a week before the tournament starts.
If you, reader, thread poster, and presumably 1v1 World Cup player, are truly so upset at this decision as to call into question the fairness of the tour, I implore you to take that energy and actually direct it at the game. This is a competitive site for competitive players who should be more interested in doing their best to win instead of pointing fingers in policy threads in hopes it will make their competition fall apart. Try and beat us if it seems so impossible to you. If you enter a tournament believing you have already lost it, then you have.
