Do we know yet?
South America was getting extra attention last year too
Which is hilarious, their playerbase is times smaller than any other region (NA, EMEA, APAC), their teams had no international success except for KRU (not counting LOUD because it happened after 2022 slots were distributed)
It'd be funny to see NiP and Vivo Keyd in Champions, but only 3 of Fnatic/FPX/Liquid/M3C/Guild/G2/Acend would make it
It should be 16 imo.
3 Slots NA
4 Slots EMEA (Riot will always give EMEA more)
2 SEA
1 KR
1 JP
1 BR
1 LATAM
1 Brazil / LATAM
1 Brazil / LATAM / NA -- Best remaining Brazil, Best remaining LATAM, seed 4 and 5 NA
1 Asian -- Best remaining 2 Japan, best 2 remaining Korea , Best 3 remaining SEA.
We lose a lot of the snuffs, and the (as ill call them) "Battle of the America's!" and the "Battle of Asia!" would be very fun to watch. With this system, more teams get international-ish competition, and we get less shit teams in the Masters regardless of the higher team amount.
How is it terrible? EMEA, NA, SEA and BR are only regions who can send more than 1 competitive team. KR, JP and LATAM are one team regions. BR is 1-2 team region depending on form. SEA has at least couple teams that can do decently. NA has multiple competitive teams, while EMEA has slightly more and is also bigger region in terms of population/area. For 12 slots that is perfect distribution. Anything else would be biased.
(I'm really just trying to get more Korean teams and north American teams in. The fact is, Korean experience will boost the region performance more if it's not just DRX improving. Second is NA will fall behind EMEA despite having a more competitive overall scene (Top 20 NA > Top 20 EMEA) and I'd like to lessen the international blunder you get as a first time team. Bring in more teams not only livens the event, but gives more experience to a wider span of teams. I just think 16 teams > 12 teams.)
A major reason why regions like KR, JP, and LATAM all only have one team is that they only get one slot, so new teams aren't given a chance to get experience outside of their region and new orgs (other than in JP b/c of viewership) aren't willing to invest
Look at what BR was able to achieve because of getting more than one slot, they still have mostly mediocre teams but the region is alive due to a boom in org investment, possible due to not having to only play against a superteam like LOUD for a chance at a singular slot
I'd argue that if teams like ONS and Leviatan, who are at worst the same tier as NiP, were able to attend a LAN, both regions would improve massively in both skill and investment