The balance team is not responsible for the region lock.
This Blizzcon has had objectively some of the worst tournament play I have ever seen - Protoss players throwing away warp prisms for no blasted reason, Terran players spamming dozens of mules on the wrong side of the map, the list goes on and on. One has to wonder how on Earth some of these players made it to the biggest tournament of the year, and if there are players who are more deserving.
There are so many amazing Korean players who didn’t get to go to blizzcon. Innovation, Taeja, Dear and Zest come to mind; each of them absolute monsters. Innovation took out Serral to win a tournament this year and regularly has 7k mmr, Taeja took Serral to the final game in the finals of HSC (even though he, Taeja, had just recently returned to the game) and Zest and Dear are both 7k MMR monsters (serral is ~6.8k on KR). Stats for comparison typically has, to my understanding, ~6.5k mmr and even he has taken out Serral before.
If you want to stop having crappy Blizzcons, and foreign tournaments in general, we need to stop handing out free passes to foreign players who wouldn’t cut the mustard if they weren’t protected by the region lock. The only requirement to reach blizzcon ought to be sheer skill, but when all the best players are locked into an itty bitty region you end up with blizzcon being like this.
The big irony of all this is that the region lock was put in place to stop the top koreans from farming the foreign scene, but now a small handful of players (serral, reynor, etc) farm it all and there is EVEN LESS diversity in who wins. Ironically, yet not at all surprising, this attempt at affirmative action backfired and actually made the problem worse (like affirmative action always does). If you don’t want the foreign scene to be farmed by the strongest few players, the region lock needs to be removed to level the playing field. Dark’s blizzcon victory over Reynor proved this quite clearly.
Remove the region lock. Save eSports.