Hey Codeforces community,

The recent selections for the ICPC India Amritapuri Regionals just dropped, and the current selection algorithm feels increasingly broken for competitive programming as a sport.

In the preliminary round, we solved 6 problems (A-E and H) and finished with an overall rank of ~450. However, because we were College Rank 2 at our institute, we did not get selected for the regionals.

Meanwhile, teams with a global rank around ~3700 are advancing simply because they hold the College Rank 1 spot at their respective universities, often with only 1 or 2 solves.

It is incredibly frustrating to see top-500 teams get boxed out by 1-solve teams purely due to institutional diversity quotas. Guaranteeing spots to smaller colleges might help grassroots participation, but the current math heavily penalizes secondary teams at competitive colleges to the point where absolute merit is completely ignored.

I understand the underlying philosophy: ICPC wants to promote grassroots competitive programming across as many colleges as possible. Guaranteeing a slot to the top team from every college encourages participation and justifies registration fees for smaller institutions. But there has to be a limit to how heavily meritocracy is penalized in the name of ecosystem growth.

Is this really the best way to foster elite competitive programming?