[nirvAnA]

perceptions
the best of SEA perceive edge to be better thats why he got in. it might be a little because he is friends with them but imo it has more to do with his high placings in basically every sea tournament in the last 3 months, whereas you/deth have been largely absent. they have based their votes on those results, u may feel u/deth are better but you dont have the results for the voters to see to back it up, and that is why their perception is such.

basically the seeds were based on the collective perception of the 20 top and active players on SEA which differs alot from your perception, hence the anger, which is understandable because people always beleive their perception to be more correct and better than the next person. Which is also why to be fair i used an average of votes and did not give particular players votes more weight.

popularity?
an example of this - pple like kowi/jesse are so far detached from community, i doubt anyone voted them in based on friendship. i recall i would look at kowis real id friends and alwayse be suprised he only had 9 friends for 5 months, 3 of them being his siblings and well that jesse kid bms the shit out of everyone in this list(and although hes "manner" to us he could not receive clan votes) im supirsed they even voted him. so no, i do not think this is a popularity contest. ice is far from a friendly guy and he ended up top seed.

finally its not like, we selected 12 garbage players, this is the collective opionion of the top 12 players from the very best players in sea. it was extremely competitive, over 200 votes were cast and good players like starhunter/wild/voices had not a single vote thats how tough it was. like edge and many others have said, this is a very strong group and even if its not completely perfect, i would say this is an extremely accurate list save 2-3 players and even those are close

time/sponsor constraints
yea edge, i could have gotten pple to pm me but i wanted voting transparency and yes, a selection for each code S spot would have been fairer but the logistics of that is ridiculous, if 2 tourneys a week it will be over 2-3 months like WD psi and we had this timing window where gsl was over to capitilise on to get viewers. then theres also the issue of admins/prizes for those tournies making the final prizes lower, that and the sponsor wanted it happening now.

i felt this form of code S selection was best method if you consider the circumstances we were facing. and personally i would liked to have seen deth/azz in as well but hey theres the whole point why i had 4 open slots, to allow for "errors" in the system. and im pretty cut at how hard u were guys were flaming the selection procedure on pod cast, where ive taken time and tried to be as fair as possible instead of doing it the easy way, say choosing 12 players i want or the sponsor wants or using sc2ranks or having a public poll which i feel are all ridiculous options. then again i think back to the Blizz SEA invite and the anger at the choices, which i thought were pretty decent. pple qqing at "OxygeN who??" who ends up getting 3rd etc.. selection procedures for big tournaemtns will always draw flak.

if they realy are code S you can look at it this way - they have two chances to win an extra $75 from winning in code A in additional to anything won in code s so free money for them, with the fact that theres weaker competition in code A with all code S players being banned from it.