TPCi needs to plan better.

This year, every Regional and Special Event were announced for the US & Canada region beforehand. This was very helpful for planning the season ahead of time. This was much appreciated in general. This same courtesy needs to be extended to the Latin America and Oceania regions, as it would solve the "Colombia problem", fix stipend inequalities, and make things generally more convenient and less uncertain for all players.

The Colombia Problem

Source: Limitless

Over Easter weekend, two Americans traveled to an SPE in Colombia. One of them went 0-5, which affected nobody, quite luckily. The other won the whole event though, causing a clamor for both keeping Latin American points in Latin America as well as the fact that this precedent of Americans traveling abroad would make the Day Two race that much more strenuous and expensive.

Pokemon could avoid the "Americans in Colombia" problem by planning the whole season at once, including Latin America's Special Events. This way, they could make it a "rule" that SPEs in the Andean region must be run on the same day as U.S. Regionals. This doesn't technically stop Americans from going (I went to Ecuador on the same day as Costa Mesa), but it makes it a worse financial decision to leave the country, to say the least.

In this way, TPCi can put an artificial limit on which events Americans attend without having to place harmful region-locks or getting rid of the unlimited BFL.

Stipend Inequalities

This would also solve a problem concerning stipends. The issue involves Chile, Brazil, Mexico, and to a lesser extent Argentina, although I'm sure it happens in the APAC region too. These countries have a similar number of Tier Two events, but are on extremely uneven footing because of how these events are distributed throughout the year.

Mexico will have four Tier Two events this year, but ALL of them will be past the cutoff date for the NAIC stipends date. This gives the rest of Latin America a huge edge when it comes to the Day Two race because it practically makes stipends impossible to receive for Mexicans. This is why none of them can fight for Day Two outside of Pablo Meza, and he is only in contention because he plays in a lot of US events.

It would be most ideal and fair that if a country has four Tier Two events, that they would be spread out about one per quarter. This would invigorate people to go for the invite throughout the year, and possibly even to travel more to try and get points.

The situation with Mexico is not uncommon. TPCi seems to like to give a handful of SPEs last minute worldwide which makes the final eight weeks of the season absolutely filled with events. This happens even though much of the beginning of the season remaining empty. Last year, there were 28 Special Events worldwide, and 24 of those took place after April 1st. This year is looking quite similar in places like Mexico and APAC, and it would not have happened if TPCi could have simply allocated and published a schedule of their events earlier in the year.

It's generally inconvenient to have so many SPEs given out at the end of the year like this. If they were all approved early, people in the LA and APAC regions could plan ahead better. Players benefit from having more information and there are very few drawbacks to this.  Uncertainty is not fun! This would also mean that TPCi wouldn't have to constantly update the Regionals and Special Events page, which they seem to be very, very slow to update (they currently show zero Special Events in Latin America and Asia Pacific despite the fact that at least eleven have taken place there so far).

Taking the above steps and planning out the season in those two regions as they already do for NA & EU would cause many benefits and fix small problems that have chipped at the system all year.

Please do down south what you've already done up north, TPCi. Please make this system better.