The whole point of the world cup is to find the best battlers in the world. How prestigious is the title "Best in the world" if you dont even allow every country to participate? I wanted to move in a more global direction this year, with other communities coming in too, and so far it has happened with germany in full force as well as france and brazil somewhat. It provides a great opportunity for smogon to expand its horizons beyond the same people we always battle, and if nothing else prove to these other competitive communities that we are indeed the best.
How fucking arrogant is it to tell people we are better than them, and then when they ask us to prove it we dont even let them battle!
If Italy can prove to me and shiv that they have committed battlers, and have the numbers to form a team, there is no reason we dont let them into the qualifiers. This means they all have to sign up in this topic also with Europe (Italy) as team choice.
This is the exact direction I wanted to move in, with this not being just a smogon tournament but quite literally a global tournament. Now we just need to get the legit japanese players in on this for a real team asia! [does anyone know any of them lol?]
And for all those out there who want to get this going asap, you can see why we are not rushing anything as we really want to reach out to every battler/community possible.