This is just mostly going to be a rant about HotC & Bushiroad USA tournament support and how they handle the competitive community. So if you’re looking for some real Weiss content, sorry check my youtube page for new deck profiles up. There should be a Symphogear G deck coming up later tonight.

For the time I’ve played this game there was always just been one major tournament NA WGP, which is ran by HotC. HotC for what it is does an ok job running their tournament, but there are so many problems with it. One of the major problems this tournament has is that it’s done in a store in a city that fucking blows(there is nothing to do there as a tourist of the area). There is hardly any room for players or a space to have community side events during and after the tournament. I dislike that it’s done in such a small city (Rochester, NY) and is (as far as I’ve played) in the same city year after year giving the community around there a huge advantage since there is no first place prizing for regionals to get the top players out there. The tournament usually has something like 60% of it’s player base being based in or around the area that the tournament takes place. It’s very clear that the quality of tournament hurts a lot due to this. There are areas in the USA that currently has a bigger community than Rochester, NY. Southern California for one has such a huge community now that it probably out classes a lot of other NA communities as we have tournaments that easily hit 50+ for any events we throw out there. There are many top players from all region that can’t make it to Rochester, NY because of the cost of travel. I wouldn’t even mind the cost of travel if the tournament moved around every year to different communities to give all the top players a shot at competing without having to worry about travel fees. On top of all this, last year’s tournament format was a joke and I hope Bushi Japan gets their shit together because as far as I’m concerned the results from last year don’t mean shit from a competitive stand point.

I’d love to see HotC get a real venue at a hotel or convention center so players can have the room and community area they need to hold side events and other things during the tournament. I want to see some kind of prize support or compensation for fees to travel out to the tournament if you’re getting top spots at regionals, if the event is always going to be in the same city. I want to see the event move around the USA some, hitting major cities or communities so we can get different player bases out and to this event.

Bushiroad USA, what are you even doing? I have no idea how disconnected you guys are to your community for Weiss Schwarz, but you guys are generally throwing potential money away and just dropping the ball over and over. Your company is located in the same area as one of the biggest if not the biggest community in NA for Weiss Schwarz. You should know that there are huge Japanese Weiss Communities in your area and around the USA, yet you chose to dismiss this community in favor of running English only event. Hey! I wouldn’t even be complaining if events allowed Japanese cards as long as they have been released in English, but come on you can only run English cards! You’re causing a big fissure in your community by doing this. One thing though I like is that you run FREE EVENTS, that’s something really cool about you guys, but hey the higher level competitive players don’t only want to play for fun, they want to play for more than that. You guys need to include some kind of pay to play event along side of your free tournaments. If anything free events should be a side event for major tournaments like this years Neo-Showdown. Prize support can jump leaps and bounds other than a paper that says “yay you did it gratz on 1st Kappa”. If you have any plans on pushing the competitive scene you need to increase the prize pool or actually just have a real one.

I know every card game can’t be Magic: The Gathering for their tournament and competitive scene, but you can at least look at their success and find ways to simply improve upon what little things you have now. I want to see better prize support in the future for your events and hopefully see a change on the English only rule that the NA scene has to deal with while the rest of the world can play what they want.