Week 1 and 2 of OWCS EMEA/NA prove that the regions have enough competition to justify 8 teams.

When NA and EMEA were announced to have 6 teams each in OWCS instead of 8, there was this narrative going around that it made more sense because the gap between the top teams and bottom teams in OWCS were just too big, so going from 8 to 6 teams made sense. (And yes I’m aware the real reason is probably because OWCS had a decrease in budget so they needed to cut down, but the gap narrative was strong in community discussions) But after the first two weeks of this stage, I feel like that just is not true.

Without getting into specifics, in these first two weeks, more than 1/3 of the matches were upsets, and among the upsets more than half of them were between a top half and bottom half team. This shows that the teams in the 6 team format are all super close together, and that they absolutely could justify having 8 teams in each region.