This morning, our university received communication stating that only two teams per university will be allowed at SWERC. Consequently, our team (MeGustaElArroz23, BernatP, and misteg168) won't be able to participate in the contest.
This is the first time a SWERC host hasn't accepted 3 teams in the last 20 years, I don't know the reason for such a rule but my guesses are:
Space constraints: This can be solved easily by moving to some other place, like a sports Hall.
Financial constraints: This can also be solved easily, just increment the loan for unis who want to send more teams, SWERC loan is not expensive at all for teams who care about the contest and come from developed countries and all SWERC countries are developed countries.
I think perhaps a signature collection can change their minds, maybe a letter signed by all universities.
Either way, I would want to know the reason for such a rule.
Ping of all SWERC admins from Swerc mirror
dario2994, cescmentation_folch, cip999, gangsterveggies, gog.gerard, Giove, jinlifu1999, Petr, Simon, tap_tapii, Um_nik.
Feels bad working 20h a week for half a year to hear that you cannot participate anymore..
This situation is way embarassing
A very unfortunate decision, possibly due to the change of the hosting university and its capacities, that would likely be detrimental to competitive programming in south-western Europe. All the while
I understand that SWERC is trying to involve more universities to participate, but it shouldn't be done at the cost of discouraging existing universities from trying to maintain larger local competitive programming communities. And such a strict limit on the number of teams surely will discourage a lot of people from being involved in ICPC-related activities in the future...
As other people said, every other regional contest in Europe allows Universities to send at least 4 teams, and SWERC has allowed 3 teams per institution every single year since its creation. From the perspective of wanting to increase the level of the regional, it makes absolutely no sense to limit the number of teams from strong universities, where it is normal for all 3 teams to compete for medals, and now also for European Championship qualification.
Also the notice time of 1 month means that most Universities will have to rearrange the teams and even the ones who end up participating will have been training with a different team for 2 months.
Overall I find it to be a very disgraceful decision.
As far as I know, none (or at most one) of the people you are mentioning is involved in the preparation of this year's edition of SWERC.
My goal was to contact the problem setters also, local host organizers are usually university professors, most of them were not "tryhard contestants" back when they were studying and don't understand how much effort is needed to prepare for such a contest, training for long hours, dedicating yourself to this contest...
Problemsetters are usually past contestants who are really into competitive programming and spent hours training, they are the ones who understand our situation, and they will be more committed to persuading the organization to make a change. They are our only chance to make them change the rules.
I understand that, but you should try to contact the problem setters of the this year's edition.
Oh, ok I thought you meant you were just a problem setter, not an organizer. Do you know any new problem setter?
I think you should contact your ICPC Country Director or ICPC Regional Director
The list of organizers and problem setters of this year's swerc is on the official website: https://swerc.eu/2023/organizers/
If you want to contact anyone I recommend using the official email listed there (swerc@lip6.fr) don't try to contact any one individual directly.
It's also the first time that our uni(USI) needs a selection contest. We had 3 teams participate last year.
By the way, why not distribute the slots for each uni according to how they did in the last year? Strong uni should have more slots.