i can't really say i agree with the decision regarding bw, since we are essentially using an official tournament as a suspect test. it's at the very least a relevant change in a metagame that has been stable for about 2 years now, I'm not sure how quickly bw players are going to adapt. i know there are going to be a few live tours, but will that be enough? I mean in ORAS OU we have like 100,000+ battles in a suspect ladder before deciding about banning / unbanning a single mon
however, i see no problem in adding rby/gsc to the tournament. how can there only be 3 players of each tier if we've had at least 10 of them playing for spl? that excluding farm league / bench players too, as well as multi-gen players like bkc or mcm. well yeah obviously some dudes like tiba stand out from the others, but would it really be fair for everyone if it was like last year's format? east for instance literally went 15-0 in xy in r1. obviously there are going to be skill gaps no matter what the format is. additionally, i'd argue RBY is a relatively easy tier to learn. look at people like KratosMana who started playing in BW, picked RBY in 2 weeks and went undefeated in the spl, or soulgazer in oupl, etc. not sure about gsc, but i've seen shake playing it well, and if someone as bad as him can play it everyone can bop.