Lower-tier World Cups tend to be dominated by the few regions with the highest concentration of competent mainers. That’s expected — more players putting in effort means stronger teams. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but we have to admit it makes the tournament far from competitive if you're not from the 2-3 regions with real chances.
Some people argued that the team imbalance from this year’s edition won’t happen again if we run in back, mainly because of the planned creation of a Midwestern US team (which would pull some players from the Northeast) and, for Europe, well… you know what happened.
USNE:
Northeast’s biggest strength was their sheer concentration of top-tier tournament players from across the site — something no other region can really match — combined with mainers who actually care. Even their bench was stacked with strong builders and support players. As long as they have people capable of passing solid teams to competent pilots, they’ll always have a major edge over every other region.
Now, if a Midwest team gets formed, they’re supposedly losing players like avarice, beats, sleid, chungler, and ho3n. But let’s be honest: only avarice and beats played the entire tour. Sleid didn’t play at all, chungler only started in playoffs, and ho3n cancered or something. That’s hardly a meaningful loss looking at the total.
And even then, they’ve got replacements that are hardly downgrades — BloodAce was benched for part of last year, SBPC didn’t even make the roster but could easily fill a slot, and they could bring in Tack or shuffle Monai and others into BW if need be without Beats. The point is: they’ve got the depth. A Midwest team existing doesn’t really weaken them enough; they still have more than enough high-level players to remain dominant.
Europe:
They lost fish anemometer, yo cho, anan2004, and Lily—though to be fair, they lost Lily during this year’s tour and still won it, so take that as you will. Losing fish and cho does hurt, since they were the ones building most of the SV teams for the pilots and were easily among the most active members. I saw it firsthand when I joined their server for finals (or maybe semis, can’t remember). Let's please not buy the Tuthur fake news that they actually lost 3x fish anemometer because the other two were ghost slots.
The real point with Europe is that even without fish and cho, they still have a stacked foundation: strong pilots and top tier mainers like Drud and OBB. The argument that “they’re not broken because they don’t care enough to build for teammates” is honestly kind of ridiculous. Maybe they don’t care that much—but for the tournament to have a chance at being fair, they need to not care. That’s the only thing holding them back from being as dominant as last year.
It’s like they’re saying, “Yeah, we’re still better than most teams, but don’t worry, we’re not trying that hard.” You just have to hope they actually stick to that, because if they start caring like fish and yo cho did, we’re back to square one: an unbalanced tournament dominated by the same region yet again.
