You're right, so Mouz, Empire, EG, and DD shouldn't have been invited to the qualifiers right?
All the teams you listed in your previous post make the argument for an expanded qualifier stronger. Why's it hurt to have a 12 or 16 man qualifier? What's there to lose? What's negative about that? This is what I don't understand about people that are so defensive of Valve, that they can even find fault with adding a few extra teams to each qualifier. What's the harm?
Again, like I said in my first post there are no teams that didn't get invited directly that have had a completely stable roster, but they have pairs or trios in their teams that have been long time teammates. I'll list them again with further explanation (in the ones you bring up):
From DD: 7ckngMad, Sockshka, and Funzii have been playing together since April of last year, Goblak and Silent have been playing together for 7 months.
From Mouz: Black, Fata, and PAS have been playing together for 5 months, and Black has been the core that the team has been based around for a year
From EG: Demon and Fear have been together for 1.5 years, and everybody besides Bamboe has played together for 6 months
From Empire: Scandal and Blowyourbrain have played together for a year.
Rox.Kis has the least amount of time of any pair of familiar players and at least they have 2 pairs of players that have 4 months together, and in that time they placed second in a lan against 3 international invites. Similarly, iCCup has the next lowest amount of time together, and they also placed second in a lan with 2 international invites.
Not a single pair of players from Kaipi has played together for more than 3 months. The pair that does have at least 3 months is pieliedie and bone7. If you asked the same panel of people who whine about Kaipi not getting in if they would invite the team "pieliedie and bone7 plus 3" they would say no.
They have only really shown their strength for about a month, and that's fine. I hope that they meet the potential that they are showing, and all they have to do is what Dignitas did this past year. They only really showed up the month before the qualifiers last year on PotM bottom, but they stayed active, stayed consistent, stayed together, and they were one of the clear picks for TI3. I just am tired of a lot of the community who only seem to talk about Kaipi in terms of "EE worked so hard for this he deserves an invite," so what? Everybody in the teams both invited to the main event and the qualifier has worked hard. (I am not necessarily saying you are arguing specifically for Kaipi, its just that 99% of the community speaking out against the picks is and that is more what I am ranting about than you specifically.)
Sorry if I was unclear on the second point though. I would have been glad to see a larger qualifier; I don't think there's anything to lose by doing so. I do think however from a logistical and organizational standpoint limiting the invites for the qualifier makes plenty of sense, because running open qualifiers would be a huge undertaking and would take so much time that it would be hard to keep focus, and if its not open the question will always be how many invites is enough? Choosing to be stricter on invites has also led to many more teams being in contention for the qualifiers (only maybe 3 teams were really considered to have a chance to win the qualifiers last year, as opposed to it being relatively even this year) and a likely more even overall tournament. (again, as opposed to people thinking at the very least 5 of the teams not having a chance)
Maybe the knowledge that the qualifier pool will be limited will make people start shaping up earlier and really get them going to the point where everybody will even say anybody including just the qualifier teams would have a decent chance at winning the international.
(It did make me laugh a bit a few nights ago when iceiceice said he didn't really care about the western qualifiers because it was a bunch of teams that don't have a chance of placing at the international.)
