lootonly 3 or 4 of the bottom 8 playoff teams are even still alive
I think 5/8 are alive, chefs might be dead, and i think
If i'm right, Move ups would be
Egg Salad
Not Around Bears
Westbrook
Chefs?
*Dieextracrispy (stole the yompies roster already though)
*arstotzka (bote 6v6 could use the roster if they wanted to IM)
Dead Teams
Snailed it
Young Hunters
Creative Juices
team name tbd
The baddies
hands off
*Slammin Salmon (still a lot rostered, but top comment is RIP, are they dead?)
*Yompies (im assuming would die if diextracrispy got moved up, since they wouldn't have to deal with hijack rules)
So currently there are 17-18 teams and there would be 20-22 depending on if chefs or salmon are dead during moveups. Move ups would leave 39-41 open teams, although that's only including teams with 1 paid up in open.
Basically, my thoughts are if Salmon are dead and there's only 17 teams, doing the move up doesn't make sense because each IM team should play each other once in a 17 team division. If slammin salmon (or any of the other dead teams) are alive (and no other teams die), they may as well do the move ups since it couldn't be a system of every team plays each other once. To me, keeping 17 teams is the only good argument to not do the move ups.
On the argument of developing better in open than IM, I'd actually disagree with that. They'll either roll low/mid open teams, or get rolled by high IM teams. Scrims are where they'll develop and odds are they'll be scrimming IM teams anyways, may as well play in the division at that point.
**note, the only open playoff team I didn't consider is bshears ponytail since no one is paid up. They do cover the hijack rule though. As a new team they might just want to play open**
edit:
trippawe dont need main right now, the scene isnt big enough, having 3 divisions is already a blessing
s14-s15 were much larger than esea is right now which is why they got main
To grow the league would it not be beneficial to grow the number of IM rosters? More move ups-> more living rosters -> bigger IM division? Open continues to get a number of teams (and I can only hope matchmaking boosts that further), so in theory growing IM is what would be needed for there to be a reason for main.