Since I have now both participated in NEERC and NWERC, I have my personal opinions comparing the two semifinals, which I want to share.

Before I actually participated in NWERC, I always thought that advancing from NEERC to the World Finals is harder than from most of the other regions, because there are a lot of really good teams in NEERC. Now I'm thinking otherwise. If there are only 2-3 advancing teams then, in my opinion, a lot more luck is involved. I mean, I could see it from my own example — we had a very good start, leading for half of a contest, including freezing, but haven't solved one easy task in the end, and that was it and we dropped down to 4th — so a single fail is enough to fail all the contest. Yes, of course, I'm not trying to blame anyone for our own fails, but still it was just a single crucial fail. I'm pretty sure every year there are some teams, that had made that one mistake, and as the result are left out of World Finals. Now, at NEERC, because the quota is so big, if you're really fighting for the finals, you're allowed to make some crucial mistakes, and still qualify. Like my team did last year, for example, we had so many places that we thought we could get a lot better, and we still qualified. Again, this is all coming from my personal experience, but I believe that there are quite a considerable amount of teams suffering from this every year.

Hence, why do we even have such small semi-finals like NWERC, SEERC etc.? Why don't we unite some semi-finals, so that from each semi-final a reasonable amount of teams advances (like 10-15). This, in my opinion will give more fairness if united regions are balanced correctly.

Although I'm still writing it under the effect of yesterday contest, I would like that this post is viewed as a place for discussion of this what is my opinion is a problem. I hope that this is not viewed as merely a rant.