recent developments have forced bloo and me to make a number of tough calls regarding team eligibility. to preface this, i'm the first to admit there are a number of intrinsic flaws with wcop system, especially with the 'parent rule', but we did our best to work with what we have.
in summary we've decided to accept all the submitted rosters and chug along to post r1. there was a lot of controversy with players hopping from team to team and editing sketchy team eligibilities in their sign up posts. while there is some pretty convincing evidence against people like noodlez that they may have lied about team eligibility, at the end of the day the nature of this tournament (and online anonymity) means we will virtually never have 100% evidence. in addition, which is even more problematic, cracking down on the rules means that we have to crack down on every single person from every single roster, which would delay this tournament for several days. our hands are completely tied: we either do our best to ensure the rosters are 100% legit or we start the tournament on time, because i'm not willing to make such drastic rulings that kick off players without staying consistent and reviewing every single case. it's a pick your poison situation. we've decided on the lesser of the two evils.
jackal warned me about this kind of problem before wcop started, which is why he was pretty lax on team eligibility in the past. ever since we started handing out trophies to the winners of wcop, this issue has become increasingly large with people trying to play with friends and create superteams just for the sake of a temporary trophy that end of the day means absolutely nothing. i suspect this problem will get even worse in the future. i'm not really sure what we can do about this. the 'loyalty rule' implemented this year was a step in the right direction, but in the future if this problem doesn't settle itself then we'll probably have to scrap the 'parent rule' or, god forbid, can wcop altogether. this isn't a promise or a threat. this is just an unfortunate realization of the state of this tournament.
keep in mind there was no right decision for the situation bloo and i had to call, and the two of us will inevitably be flamed for this. that's fine, it's part of the job. however, we've been put in a precarious situation where we must balance the integrity of the tournament with the tournament's timeframe, which isn't an easy task. i'm sorry to all we upset with this ruling. personally, i'm not too happy about it myself and am disappointed we were put in this situation in the first place. it was something we tried extremely hard to avoid when we posted sign ups. i'm sure many of you will be mad and question the tournament's integrity as a result, but keep in mind that over the past year bloo and i have done more for this forum than anyone else, and we want nothing more than for it to succeed and be respected.
we've been working on the onsite business since this morning and should have r1 up later today