A lot of what makes a sport interesting is the personalities and storylines that get involved, so playing to that helps a lot. Look at how much traction stuff like Wolfe con Perish or Dylan Salvanera's popoff got (or, Montana and Zach sharing a hug after Montana won LA Regionals for us gays.)

Either way, big things on the horizon for VGC. It feels like we're on the precipice of a completely new era for the competitive scene and I'm both excited and nervous for how things are going to go from here.

Champions hopefully can include more Global Challenge events to help out people from underserved regions who may not be able to travel easily or some other ways to get championship points/Worlds qualifier events of some kind. Would seem remiss to not make that a thing, really.

I don't think dates doubling up matters if they're on the opposite side of the world for example. Worlds having a side stream was really nice, I'd also like to see other match highlights from *that tournament* specifically in the rotation for inbetween-match footage to improve the viewer experience.

Better payouts being the big one, travel vouchers only kind of stem the money bleed that comes with playing competitive Pokemon. I'm otherwise not a logistics expert but it feels like we need more regional tournaments, preferably starting in underserved regions.

There is clearly an interest for Pokemon to be a serious esport and as of now TCPI seems to be trying to position themselves to make it perceived as one. However if it wants to be on that level I think there are some changes to be made to accommodate players better.

There's a dizzying upwards trajectory for the popularity of competitive Pokemon, to the point that my concern now is how TCPI et al are going to handle the sudden explosion in popularity because I imagine Champions is going to make it more accessible and bring even more interest.

Regardless of how that does, we are almost definitely looking at what will be the largest VGC tournament of all time, and the records for "largest tournament ever" keep getting broken every couple months.

Okay, "so many" is an exaggeration, it's just the Z megas. I am currently anticipating Z megas to be on a timer unlike regular ones and they're mostly intended to do a targeted nuke against key threats on an opponent's team. This is still all tea leaf reading/vibes based assessment ofc