-
Welcome to Smogon! Take a moment to read the Introduction to Smogon for a run-down on everything Smogon, and make sure you take some time to read the global rules.
-
Congrats to the winners of the 2024 Smog Awards!
Tournament PUWC III - Commencement Thread
- Thread starter Maia
- Start date
Hello!
As the player that was entrusted by Team Spain to be the manager, I find the decision to not let our team into the tournament totally unfair, a sentiment that is shared by my whole team.
It is true that the majority of our players have signed up during this Friday and Saturday. This is because prior to that, no one among the signed up Spanish players wanted to manage Team Spain (and some even joined Team Europe, can't really blame them though). After Eonito and me stepped forward, the situation improved quickly and in just 2 days we:
-Spread the information about the tour to more than enough players to form a team.
-Contacted already signed up Spanish players.
-Decided which of the signed up players were the most suitable ones for the team.
-Asked Arya and received from her the amazing logo of our team.
-Posted the Roster before several teams that were allowed in the tournament.
-Started to coordinate, build and prepare for the Tiers of the Tournament.
As a new team, we expected to have to fight through some kind of pre-qualification round vs other new teams or the team that ended up last in 2021 edition of this tournament. Yet despite all our efforts, the decision made by the organizers of PUWC was to leave us out.
The way I see it is that we were left out just because we started to sign up later than other teams and that if we did it a week earlier, we would have been in. This doesn't look fair or wise for us, since different teams have different paces of sign-up. The main problem, and the one I would like to complain of is the fact of deciding the final teams before the deadline of sign-ups. This is a very poor and unfair policy, since it punishes teams that have troubles finding people early, but still allows teams from previous years to sign-up a relevant amount of their players on the very last days.
With all this in mind I demand:
-To reconsider the decision of not allowing our and other teams into the tournament. If needed, we are willing fight a previous round vs all the other possible contenders (and maybe the worst team of last year) in a format that the organizers feel suitable.
-To delay the start of Week 1 one week. Matches played already could maintain results and have the same pairings.
-To rethink the rules for next years regarding new teams. To never again decide allowed teams before the deadline for sign-ups. If the deadline was on Friday and we didn't post our team by then, the decision of not allowing us would have been fair, but it was on Sunday, so we were on time. In fact, several allowed team posted their Roster after we did it.
Hopefully our demands are met and we or other new teams can prove our worth in this Tournament. Have a nice day.
As the player that was entrusted by Team Spain to be the manager, I find the decision to not let our team into the tournament totally unfair, a sentiment that is shared by my whole team.
It is true that the majority of our players have signed up during this Friday and Saturday. This is because prior to that, no one among the signed up Spanish players wanted to manage Team Spain (and some even joined Team Europe, can't really blame them though). After Eonito and me stepped forward, the situation improved quickly and in just 2 days we:
-Spread the information about the tour to more than enough players to form a team.
-Contacted already signed up Spanish players.
-Decided which of the signed up players were the most suitable ones for the team.
-Asked Arya and received from her the amazing logo of our team.
-Posted the Roster before several teams that were allowed in the tournament.
-Started to coordinate, build and prepare for the Tiers of the Tournament.
As a new team, we expected to have to fight through some kind of pre-qualification round vs other new teams or the team that ended up last in 2021 edition of this tournament. Yet despite all our efforts, the decision made by the organizers of PUWC was to leave us out.
The way I see it is that we were left out just because we started to sign up later than other teams and that if we did it a week earlier, we would have been in. This doesn't look fair or wise for us, since different teams have different paces of sign-up. The main problem, and the one I would like to complain of is the fact of deciding the final teams before the deadline of sign-ups. This is a very poor and unfair policy, since it punishes teams that have troubles finding people early, but still allows teams from previous years to sign-up a relevant amount of their players on the very last days.
With all this in mind I demand:
-To reconsider the decision of not allowing our and other teams into the tournament. If needed, we are willing fight a previous round vs all the other possible contenders (and maybe the worst team of last year) in a format that the organizers feel suitable.
-To delay the start of Week 1 one week. Matches played already could maintain results and have the same pairings.
-To rethink the rules for next years regarding new teams. To never again decide allowed teams before the deadline for sign-ups. If the deadline was on Friday and we didn't post our team by then, the decision of not allowing us would have been fair, but it was on Sunday, so we were on time. In fact, several allowed team posted their Roster after we did it.
Hopefully our demands are met and we or other new teams can prove our worth in this Tournament. Have a nice day.
Hi, I am not the host of the tour but I am the tier leader who pushed for certain things to be the way they are. Hopefully I'll be able to answer some of your queries here today.
1) You were not "entrusted" to be a manager. We announced twelve teams earlier in the week based on a signup count, that did not include Spain or you as a team captain.
2) Managers and teams are virtually ALWAYS picked prior to the end of the player signups, so the decision to announce the teams before the end of the week is not a strange decision by any means. You were not hard done by in this regard.
3) PUWC has never had a qualification round, we wanted to get this tournament started early in order for it not to extend too far into Generation 9. Morale is at a low at the end of a generation as usual, and this tournament is already going to last a couple months into the next generation in its current state.
4) No one decided to "leave you out". The decision of teams and schedules were made prior to your team having four whole signups. You cannot expect us to change the entire format of the tour just to accommodate you, after large decisions have been made.
5) I am sorry that someone spent time and effort on your team logo, but again, this is not my concern. You were already made aware Spain was not a team in this year's edition by the team announcement post, but went out of your way to then post a roster for a team that was not agreed upon.
6) I really dislike how you phrase this entire post. You have a list of demands? Whether or not rosters were posted after yours is irrelevant because we AGREED on the twelve teams and sets of managers several days prior to your roster even being posted.
Regardless of all of this, I'm sorry that we couldn't include Spain in this year's iteration. I'd definitely be down to looking into expanding the tournament next year, including Spain, LatAm, China, etc; but this year's edition won't be changing. Thank you for your interest though, and hope to see you around next year!
While it's true that a selection of teams was posted on Friday, this should always be a pre-list subjected to changes if a considerable playerbase of a country wants to play and the level is enough. This is not a demand this is how it's done in this kind lf tours. Plus sign ups closed on Sunday not on Friday, so posting a pre-list 2 days ahead of closing sign ups is a bit restrictive. Thank you.
1. I was entrusted by Spanish players. Me and Eric were the only ones to sign-up as managers, so the organizers can't really choose who gets to be manager, you can only choose whether to allow Team Spain or not.
2. Having something done always the same way does not mean the way is right.
3. Same as above. Also, not going into Gen 9 by 5 (or whatever the number is, don't have time to look it up) weeks isn't do much different from going 6 weeks.
4. You did leave us out due to the decision of having the teams decided 2 days before Sign-ups deadline.
5. It's not hard to delay just 1 week and change a couple of pairings, even if it means a team not playing each week due to odd number of teams.
6. Several days? More like ONE day. We arrived one day AFTER the wrong decision of the allowed teams, and one day BEFORE sign-up deadline.
Hi and good morning!
I'm very sorry that Team Spain wasn't able to join the tournament, and excluding people certainly wasn't my intention, but as I have explained multiple times to people asking me about this in DMs, the situation was this:
I was given a timeframe in which to host this tournament, which was to get it done before the release of Gen 9 PU. This time crunch factored into more than one hosting decision, and it is not my place to overstep the Tier Leader, especially with a new generation weeks away. I was initially told that we don't have time for qualifying weeks, and that if there were more than 12 teams that could exist, just to merge them together to create 12 so the tournament didn't extend into gen 9 territory:
Because of this, I had to make the decision to lock in teams that were already viable and had enough members to play instead of doing one or two or three extra weeks of qualifiers if Team Spain, Team China, Team Latin America, or anyone else was able to show up.
I was ultimately told the day before signups closed that I could be allocated extra weeks if enough teams signed up to warrant them (which would be 16 teams to have an even number of teams per pool and I only had three potential teams but I digress), but there was pushback from the community against doing so at the last minute and more worries about the length of the tournament:
So while I empathize and apologize for the fact that this happened and I know that it's a shitty situation, it's the decision I had to make with the limits I was given.
Ok so we see that the main concern is not to get too deep within Gen9. While team Spain understands this issue, including one more team in each group (Team Latam and Team Spain) would only imply one more week in the tour, which makes no real difference if the final result is the tour being 6 or 7 weeks within Gen 9 territory. In this case one team would "rest" each week, which is not a problem in this kind of tours. Finally, there's also the issue of leaving Latam team outside of the competition, a team that last edition had it's own team in the competition. This decision is really an issue because it leaves a huge amount of countries without chance of being represented in any of the teams. Hope you all reconsider your position and we can try solve this. Thank you once again.
Since everyone is expressing their opinions, I will express mine.
First of all, you guys talked about following the wcop rules
And if I remember correctly when I tried to put together team venezuela, the hosts and many others had really bad expectations of us (they were not wrong) it was a pretty mediocre team, but they still let us play, because according to smogon they are not in favor of "the exclusion" so I want to think that those were not just empty words, because they are leaving 2 Spanish speaking teams out and they are not mediocre teams like the one I put together back then
Maybe its a bit harsh to say, but if you're going to exclude people for fear of changing your tournament structure, I think you're just not qualified to organize this, in wcop amaranth and the others TD knew how to organize the tournament and they adapted it to the large number of teams that signed up, unlike past editions
if you cant deal with this and youre going to exclude teams so as not to change the structure, dont do any tournament
First of all, you guys talked about following the wcop rules
And if I remember correctly when I tried to put together team venezuela, the hosts and many others had really bad expectations of us (they were not wrong) it was a pretty mediocre team, but they still let us play, because according to smogon they are not in favor of "the exclusion" so I want to think that those were not just empty words, because they are leaving 2 Spanish speaking teams out and they are not mediocre teams like the one I put together back then
Maybe its a bit harsh to say, but if you're going to exclude people for fear of changing your tournament structure, I think you're just not qualified to organize this, in wcop amaranth and the others TD knew how to organize the tournament and they adapted it to the large number of teams that signed up, unlike past editions
if you cant deal with this and youre going to exclude teams so as not to change the structure, dont do any tournament
Hello
Regarding the ins deadline, has no sense since you limit the ins of the players who enter the following days, post the captains two days before this deadline and have no chance of changes without first specifying that they would do so, since to say that the managers are always announced before the deadline and not specifying the day is based only on assumptions.
It also doesn't make sense that your reasons for not taking Team Spain and Team LA into consideration was because there weren't enough ins to complete a team even though you haven't closed the ins yet.
I would like you to reconsider the decision to leave Team LA and Team Spain out of the tournament, thanks in advance.
ok I have no idea about this but this is discrimination against Hispanic people, 4 USA teams and 0 Hispanic teams is kinda kek, maybe create something like "Hispanic Alliance" where LA and Spain will play together.
Bailo por todos esos hispanos que tenían ganas de jugar y adquirir experiencia en este torneo, nos están discriminando y ustedes no hacen nada, NO HACEN NADA.
Bailo por todos esos hispanos que tenían ganas de jugar y adquirir experiencia en este torneo, nos están discriminando y ustedes no hacen nada, NO HACEN NADA.
Disclaimer that I am drunk as fuck writing this and will probably delete it later out of embarrassment
Don't really have a horse in this race or care about the outcome but my thoughts:
While I sympathize with the people whose countries/regions were unable to make it into the PUWC, I don't think that this is an argument that should be happening this late in the game. I think that if you were going to make a fuss, it should've at least happened before the actual tournament started to give Theia and Chloe ample time to discuss things. It probably should've happened after this post was made announcing the teams that will be playing in the tournament.
I think that, given the circumstances, what Chloe proposes here is also fair:
~
This sounds like a good idea on paper, but where would we slot them? Which pool?
E:
Don't really have a horse in this race or care about the outcome but my thoughts:
While I sympathize with the people whose countries/regions were unable to make it into the PUWC, I don't think that this is an argument that should be happening this late in the game. I think that if you were going to make a fuss, it should've at least happened before the actual tournament started to give Theia and Chloe ample time to discuss things. It probably should've happened after this post was made announcing the teams that will be playing in the tournament.
As someone with team tour hosting experience, think what Chloe says is fair here. It is unrealistic to expect the tournament to change after managers and participating teams have already been selected.
I think that, given the circumstances, what Chloe proposes here is also fair:
~
I'm very sure that this is not a policy that was created with the intention of discriminating against Hispanic people, and this is a wild accusation to throw around given the circumstances
~
E:
I found my answer sorry for not reading
Last edited:
To add up to everything already said by my Spanish and Latin comrades, you don,t even have to change the pairings of this Week 1. Just add Spain to one group, LA to the other and give both teams a bye this week. Then remake the remaining pairings to give each week a bye to other teams too, so that every team rests exactly one week. This would take 20 mins of your time at most , and further changes to the way teams qualify to Playoffs don,t even have to be made.
Last edited:
Honestly, I find it insane that Team Latin America thinks they can do this and "deserve" a spot in the next PUWC. "But Midwest deadgamed too!" damn okay try excluding a major US region and see how that goes. I'd also like to point out that Team LA had the most deadgames by far compared to any other team last year (8). Team Spain I'm much more sympathetic for despite me questioning their strength as a team because I understand that the tour is about inclusivity rather than competitiveness, but you can't just give up during the last week of a tour you signed up with the intention to play every week and then make impassioned posts about not being included. Like yeah, in an ideal world, PUWC would have 16 teams and a 7 week regular season, but that isn't something that's feasible simply because of how long the tour would last for a "for fun" tour and how quickly fatigue would set in. I was also one of the proponents of a qualifying round as well, so don't take this as me hating the teams; I just understand there wasn't enough time for one.
I will say that deciding teams before singups close defintely sucks. In the future, I'd like to see singups end on a Saturday, so that the Sunday after is used to confirm teams, set up threads, and do whatever else a host usually does. This shouldn't impact singups in a major way as long as this is annouced beforehand, and would solve issues in the future regarding teams that arrive late to the party not getting in (since you can use Sunday to negotiate if teams go over a limit).
Proposals like this seem nice but conviently forget that A. byes sucks and B. tiebreakers exist. Assuming no tiebreakers happen in this tour and this proposal is taken up, the tour would end on exactly New Year's Day (tiebreakers, which are probably going to happen at least once, extend this deadline of sorts by a week, so 1/8, 1/15, and 1/22 depending on the amount of tiebreakers). This presents a problem: playoffs are being played during the holidays, which are famous for draining the motivation of players because they have to focus on mons and holidays at the same time. It would be great if players could do both, but that's asking quite a lot of mons players imo.
luisin is 100% joking here, there's no way someone would come on to Smogon.com and unironically say that the policy to limit the amount of teams to 12 and to shorten singups by a week, and just so happens to exclude Team Spain and Team LA, is "discrimination against Hispanic people".
I will say that deciding teams before singups close defintely sucks. In the future, I'd like to see singups end on a Saturday, so that the Sunday after is used to confirm teams, set up threads, and do whatever else a host usually does. This shouldn't impact singups in a major way as long as this is annouced beforehand, and would solve issues in the future regarding teams that arrive late to the party not getting in (since you can use Sunday to negotiate if teams go over a limit).
I do not care if Spain is included or not, but this is an ignorant comparison and a rude conclusion to draw.
WCOP is an official tournament ran by TDs with a lot more resources provided. We had a whole team of hosts with a great deal of experience and many, many years of tradition and precedent backing the serious nature of the tournament.
This is a subforum tournament ran by an overspread volunteer or two, who people are hammering for making a decision that was seemingly made on their behalf. Having the audacity to question their qualifications and call them out is one of the most baffling things I have ever heard. They are trying their best and provided minimal resources because this is all ran by volunteers. Perhaps help out yourselves and see what it is like on their side before posting like this.
Don't be dick heads to the host who didn't even make the decision regarding who to add.
I get everyone wants a chance to play and it's unfortunate that we had to exclude some teams, but ultimately returning teams get priority and we didn't have enough new teams sign up with full rosters to expand from 12 teams to 16.
Like finch said this is a fun tour and we are lucky to have a host that actually cares and makes everything run smoothly.
Next year we will have another pre tour discussion thread a month before the tour which will give you plenty of time to gather a team and sign up. Hopefully then we can expand to 16 teams.
I get everyone wants a chance to play and it's unfortunate that we had to exclude some teams, but ultimately returning teams get priority and we didn't have enough new teams sign up with full rosters to expand from 12 teams to 16.
Like finch said this is a fun tour and we are lucky to have a host that actually cares and makes everything run smoothly.
Next year we will have another pre tour discussion thread a month before the tour which will give you plenty of time to gather a team and sign up. Hopefully then we can expand to 16 teams.
not 100% informed & no stake here but:
this eeveeto solution seems smart and very convenient, honestly. 14 teams seems very feasible and extending the tour by 1 week seems worth it to include a lot more people. smogon is kinda dying and this tour got over 400 signups which is insanely impressive, it would be good to reward that by letting teams participate even if they joined late or whatever their mistake was.
two 7 team divisions, top 3 make playoffs, 1 seed in each division gets a bye. very fun format.
i'm not sure if there are 2 other teams that could hypothetically join on top of spain and latam? if there are, then with 16 teams it gets tougher bc u cant really incorporate them this late. the bye week is what makes it possible to change this so late in the game.
some of the other posts in this thread suck and are way too hostile to the hosts. but dont hold that against the teams imo. free spain/latam
this eeveeto solution seems smart and very convenient, honestly. 14 teams seems very feasible and extending the tour by 1 week seems worth it to include a lot more people. smogon is kinda dying and this tour got over 400 signups which is insanely impressive, it would be good to reward that by letting teams participate even if they joined late or whatever their mistake was.
two 7 team divisions, top 3 make playoffs, 1 seed in each division gets a bye. very fun format.
i'm not sure if there are 2 other teams that could hypothetically join on top of spain and latam? if there are, then with 16 teams it gets tougher bc u cant really incorporate them this late. the bye week is what makes it possible to change this so late in the game.
some of the other posts in this thread suck and are way too hostile to the hosts. but dont hold that against the teams imo. free spain/latam
Totally agree with this, first there was a period of 2 weeks for all the teams to register, then they reduce it to one week and they had not even closed the registrations when they had already made the pairings, 0 sense does this really make
I propose that westop arguing and stop trying to defend what cannot be defended, and start looking for solutions so that no one is excluded and we can all play
Last edited:
I understand the frustrations of being left out I wasn't even picked by my own region :pain:. However you guys are asking for way way too much here. Stop harassing the hosts and move on between time constraints and a lot of potential teams it was inevitable someone would unfortunately be left out.
I don't want to put out any opinions about what the right course of action here is (though I do think posting rosters before signups ended was not the best idea, especially when the signup time was originally a week longer before being truncated out of the blue), and I think sadly people are being very disrespectful towards Theia who honestly didn't do anything wrong, but I also think calling this a "for fun" tour is a little iffy.
Ubers World Cup was very recent, and despite being a more popular tier than PU afaik, it did not offer a custom prize and received significantly less signups than PUWC. A huge portion of people are clearly here for the prize, and that does add some weight to it.
First of all, I wanna ask for a friendly discussion so I'm making the first step and I'm apologizing for what my player One Last Kiss said about Theia of being a bad host which she isn't, she's a really good one and most of us do really appreciate her work, keep it like that.
Also I have seen many people saying that we are pointing Theia as the one who is excluding us, maybe because of the language barrier you are getting us wrong, this decision was not only made by Theia prob she even wasn't involved at all, so our complains are for those who took the decision to let Spain and Latam out of this. I personally went to PU server to give some possible solutions but no one wanted to discuss at all, they were close minded or just being sarcastic.
By those actions, I have no more paths to go through than make this post. Everyone knows the decision was not made with any malicious intention but unfortunately, we are feeling discriminated and excluded since we don't have the chance to represent our country. Spain and LATAM suggested to make both pools of 7 countries, the problematic PU Server said is "there will be a bye each week and that will low the morale of the team". In response, we are asking to adopt what Callous did on his most recent WCup in Pokemon Perfect. Each team will battle all of their pool partners + 1 of the other pool. I know this might change a bit the schedule, and I'm down to help fix the schedule personally if it's necessary. Week 1 doesn't have to change at all, as the tournament structure I proposed let Spain and LATAM face Week 1 so everything can go on.
Also I have seen many people saying that we are pointing Theia as the one who is excluding us, maybe because of the language barrier you are getting us wrong, this decision was not only made by Theia prob she even wasn't involved at all, so our complains are for those who took the decision to let Spain and Latam out of this. I personally went to PU server to give some possible solutions but no one wanted to discuss at all, they were close minded or just being sarcastic.
By those actions, I have no more paths to go through than make this post. Everyone knows the decision was not made with any malicious intention but unfortunately, we are feeling discriminated and excluded since we don't have the chance to represent our country. Spain and LATAM suggested to make both pools of 7 countries, the problematic PU Server said is "there will be a bye each week and that will low the morale of the team". In response, we are asking to adopt what Callous did on his most recent WCup in Pokemon Perfect. Each team will battle all of their pool partners + 1 of the other pool. I know this might change a bit the schedule, and I'm down to help fix the schedule personally if it's necessary. Week 1 doesn't have to change at all, as the tournament structure I proposed let Spain and LATAM face Week 1 so everything can go on.
The issue with this imo is it sets a precedent that no host wants to see where you can try and force your way in to a future wc using this as a reference. I get the frustrations but you guys aren't the first team to be left out of a wc nor will you be the last, everyone wishes we could include every single possible team but that just isn't feasible and this course of action would be bad for future wcs.
If you ask me, I rather set a precedent that everything can be changed to better than a WCup where Spanish speakers aren't represented at all.
I agree the format is worth discussion for future wcs but what you're demanding is pretty unreasonable, as Chloe already pointed out you're asking them to change the entire format just to accommodate these shenanigans. There was no ill intent by Theia or anyone involved in the decision making progress as they followed the same procedures as past wcs. Why should they set a bad precedent for you when they haven't done it for anyone else? This would be extremely unfair to past teams that were left out of wcs. Theia shouldn't have to deal with this and get disrespected the way she has here.
I wasn't going to reply again here for my own sanity but I feel obligated to follow up on my first post:
Why were signups closed early? This seems to be the biggest sticking point, and is a valid complaint, so here we go:
As I explained/you can see in my first post, I was initially hard capped at twelve teams and we had already reached that within 48 hours of signups being posted. This is an absurd amount of signups for a subforum world cup at the end of a generation, but custom avatar goes crazy I guess. When I made the announcement of regions, we were on page 14 of signups which, for those of you keeping track, is around 350 signups in less than four days. I'd already been told that I wouldn't have time for qualifiers, so the options I had were to close signups early and exclude some regions, or close signups a week later and exclude some regions.
By the time I was told I could bump the number to sixteen teams if necessary, it was less than 36 hours until signups were now set to close and I had fifteen teams: the twelve initially chosen, Spain, Latin America, and China. It would not be feasible to selectively include or exclude these teams nor would it be possible to hold qualifiers for the reasons outlined above. The reason Spain and Latin America were not chosen in my initial set of regions was due to the fact that Spain had shown no inkling of forming an independent team and I had counted the Spain signups we did have into Europe instead, since that's where they historically have been in PUWC, and in the fourteen pages of signups we had prior to regions being announced, we had a grand total of five Latin America signups, so I clearly couldn't fit them into my initially given cap with less than half a team. The idea that this is because I'm discriminating against Spanish speakers is absurd at best and insulting at worst.
Finally, and to be very blunt, the idea that you think that you can come in here, insult me, accuse me of discrimination, and then demand that I change the format of the tournament after the tour has already started and games have already been played is frankly ridiculous. I don't usually pull this card, but like Finch said, I am one woman who is volunteering her time here on top of hosting seven other tournaments and my other duties on both sites and my irl situation. I have been pushed by both leadership and the community to get this tour done as fast as possible in anticipation of Gen 9, and I won't apologize for attempting to accommodate that.
I am sorry that a few teams had to be excluded and that I couldn't make everybody happy. But sometimes, that's how it goes. I'm not shoving two more teams into a tournament and adding arbitrary byes to still exclude Team China just so people will stop accusing me of discrimination that doesn't exist.
Thanks for your understanding.
Why were signups closed early? This seems to be the biggest sticking point, and is a valid complaint, so here we go:
As I explained/you can see in my first post, I was initially hard capped at twelve teams and we had already reached that within 48 hours of signups being posted. This is an absurd amount of signups for a subforum world cup at the end of a generation, but custom avatar goes crazy I guess. When I made the announcement of regions, we were on page 14 of signups which, for those of you keeping track, is around 350 signups in less than four days. I'd already been told that I wouldn't have time for qualifiers, so the options I had were to close signups early and exclude some regions, or close signups a week later and exclude some regions.
By the time I was told I could bump the number to sixteen teams if necessary, it was less than 36 hours until signups were now set to close and I had fifteen teams: the twelve initially chosen, Spain, Latin America, and China. It would not be feasible to selectively include or exclude these teams nor would it be possible to hold qualifiers for the reasons outlined above. The reason Spain and Latin America were not chosen in my initial set of regions was due to the fact that Spain had shown no inkling of forming an independent team and I had counted the Spain signups we did have into Europe instead, since that's where they historically have been in PUWC, and in the fourteen pages of signups we had prior to regions being announced, we had a grand total of five Latin America signups, so I clearly couldn't fit them into my initially given cap with less than half a team. The idea that this is because I'm discriminating against Spanish speakers is absurd at best and insulting at worst.
Finally, and to be very blunt, the idea that you think that you can come in here, insult me, accuse me of discrimination, and then demand that I change the format of the tournament after the tour has already started and games have already been played is frankly ridiculous. I don't usually pull this card, but like Finch said, I am one woman who is volunteering her time here on top of hosting seven other tournaments and my other duties on both sites and my irl situation. I have been pushed by both leadership and the community to get this tour done as fast as possible in anticipation of Gen 9, and I won't apologize for attempting to accommodate that.
I am sorry that a few teams had to be excluded and that I couldn't make everybody happy. But sometimes, that's how it goes. I'm not shoving two more teams into a tournament and adding arbitrary byes to still exclude Team China just so people will stop accusing me of discrimination that doesn't exist.
Thanks for your understanding.