Decision analysis
Was removing Clock necessary and proportionate?
The WCA identified several concerns regarding Clock. That establishes reasons for considering change. It does not, by itself, establish that permanent removal was the necessary or proportionate response.
This analysis does not attempt to determine what decision the WCA should have reached. It examines whether the publicly available record allows the community to understand which factors determined the outcome, what evidence was considered relevant, what alternatives were evaluated, why action was considered necessary before the event framework was available, and why permanent removal was selected.
Analytical approach
From identifying a problem to justifying a response
Identifying operational, competitive or strategic concerns is only one part of a decision-making process.
A decision with permanent consequences should also make it possible to understand which factors actually determined the outcome, what evidence was considered relevant, why action was necessary, what alternatives were considered, whether the selected response was proportionate, and how its expected impact compared with its expected benefit.
01 · Determining factors
What factors actually determined the decision?
The official announcement of 24 June highlighted several concerns relating specifically to Clock: incidents, scrambling difficulty, different procedures and equipment, spectator readability, fundamental differences from other events, and the WCA's identity. It also stated that the event survey was one of several factors considered.
In early September, former WCA Director Nick Silvestri described the decision in different terms. He said that, distilled to its fundamental factors, it balanced:
Only the first of those three factors — support for FTO — is clearly identified in the original announcement. The second and third provide additional information that was not stated there as a fundamental basis for removing Clock.
What were the factors that actually determined the decision: those emphasised in the official announcement, or the three fundamental factors later described by Nick Silvestri?
If both sets formed part of the analysis, how were they connected and weighted in reaching the final outcome?
02 · Evidence and relevance
What evidence mattered — and by what criteria?
Nick Silvestri stated that several participation-related measures were not relevant to the decision, including newcomer uptake rates, Clock retention rates and the rise in uptake rate.
“Newcomer uptake rates were not relevant. Clock retention rates were not relevant. The rise in uptake rate was not relevant.”
Nick Silvestri · WCA Forum · early September 2026
He further said that the relationship between Clock participation and future attendance was not a significant contributor to top-line KPIs and was therefore also not relevant.
A KPI can only operate as a traceable decision criterion when the objective, metric and relevant threshold are identifiable. The public record available to SaveClock has not identified which top-line KPIs were applied to the Clock decision, how they were measured, or what thresholds determined whether evidence was considered relevant.
Nick also said, speaking with his “ex-Director hat on”, that evidence of approximately a 5–10% decrease in total competitor count or another top-line metric could change his own view.
That statement is useful context, but it should not be confused with a published Board threshold: Nick presented it as a personal indication of what might change his mind, not as an identified WCA decision rule.
What KPIs, metrics, thresholds or other predefined criteria were used to determine which evidence was relevant to the decision?
If participation growth, newcomer uptake and retention were considered irrelevant, what evidence was considered sufficiently important to support permanent removal?
03 · Necessity
Did adding FTO necessarily require removing another event?
Nick Silvestri's description introduces an important premise: WCA leadership, partners and key stakeholders believed that only adding new events was undesirable.
That premise produces a replacement model:
But a preference not to keep adding events does not, by itself, establish that FTO had to enter under a one-in, one-out rule.
What documented organisational, competitive, financial or other constraint made it necessary to remove an existing event when FTO was added?
Why was introducing FTO temporarily as an 18th event not considered an acceptable interim option while the framework was developed?
04 · Alternatives
What other responses were evaluated?
A proportional decision normally requires consideration of reasonable alternatives before selecting the most disruptive option.
Importantly, several alternatives are no longer merely hypothetical. Nick Silvestri himself described multiple outcomes as reasonable, depending on how the factors were weighted.
Which of these or other alternatives were evaluated by the Board, against what criteria, and why were they considered insufficient?
05 · Urgency and timeline
Why decide before the framework was available?
The WCA Strategic Plan 2025–2028 already identified the need to “Develop a framework that supports the changing of WCA events.”
Nick Silvestri later explained that a more robust framework was likely at least another year away and that actually using it would probably add another year onto the timeline.
“A more robust framework for adding/removing/tiering events was likely at least another year out, and actually utilizing that framework would probably add another year onto the timeline.”
Nick Silvestri · WCA Forum · early September 2026
The time required to develop a framework explains why the framework was not yet available. It does not, by itself, explain why the decision could not wait for it.
What specific problem, risk or organisational need would have been created by keeping Clock until the framework was developed and applied?
What did the referenced “timeline” require, who established it, and why was meeting it important enough to make an event-removal decision before the WCA's intended decision-making framework was available?
06 · Proportionality
Does the response match the scale of the problem?
Permanent removal is a structural response. Its consequences apply to every future WCA competition, not only to competitions where scheduling, scrambling, judging or organisational pressure is greatest.
This makes proportionality a relevant question.
Was permanently removing an official event a proportionate response to the problems identified, their scale and frequency, and the alternatives available?
The Board's 24 June announcement stated that Clock remained highly prone to incidents despite multiple changes to the Regulations and identified scrambling, equipment, judging and spectator-readability concerns.
Those concerns may justify review. But proportionality requires a further step: understanding the residual problem after prior measures, what additional alternatives were considered, and why complete removal was necessary.
What analysis established that the remaining problems were serious enough that permanent removal was more appropriate than targeted, temporary or event-specific measures?
07 · Impact
Permanent decisions create permanent consequences
Removing official status affects more than scheduling at major competitions.
Nick Silvestri suggested that most Clock competitors would probably continue competing in other events and speculated that adding FTO might activate dormant competitors. He explicitly described the latter as optimistic speculation.
That raises a distinction between expected outcomes and measured impact. A permanent structural decision can reasonably be expected to compare both the potential benefit and the potential loss.
What documented analysis compared the long-term impact of removing Clock with the organisational, competitive or strategic benefit expected from doing so?
Was the risk of keeping Clock — or temporarily operating with 18 events — compared with the risk of removing it?
Participation precedent
The 2019 Feet process used predefined quantitative thresholds
Participation has previously been used explicitly by the WCA when evaluating whether an official event should remain in the catalogue.
In the process that led to the removal of 3x3x3 With Feet, participation was not merely cited in general terms. Quantitative thresholds had been established in advance.
In November 2017, the Board agreed that, following a change from Mean of 3 to Average of 5, the event would only be kept if more than 30% of competitions held Feet and more than 4.5% of competitors participated in it during the preceding 12 months.
“Feet will only be kept as an event if more than 30% of the competitions in the last 12 months held Feet and more than 4.5% of the competitors competing in the last 12 months competed in Feet.”
WCA Regulations record · November 2017
By 2019, the documented participation figures remained below those thresholds. The WCA recorded Feet in approximately 23% of competitions and with participation from 3.1% of competitors, and described it as the least popular speedsolving event by a significant margin.
“3x3x3 with Feet remains the least popular speedsolving event by a significant margin.”
WCA Regulations Committee · 4 December 2019
The situation with Clock was markedly different.
As of 1 July 2026, Clock ranked as the 7th most included event in WCA competitions, behind only 3x3x3, 2x2x2, 4x4x4, Pyraminx, 3x3 One-Handed and Skewb.
It was also only a small distance behind Skewb and 3x3 One-Handed, placing Clock among the most frequently offered events in the official WCA catalogue.
The point is not that Clock required the same numerical thresholds used for Feet.
The relevant precedent is methodological: criteria → thresholds → data → evaluation → decision.
What equivalent methodology was established for Clock, what criteria outweighed its level of competitive presence, and where were those criteria defined?
08 · Traceability
Can the decision be reconstructed from the public evidence?
SaveClock has found extensive public material explaining concerns about Clock and confirming the final outcome.
Nick Silvestri's later comments add useful information about factors, relevance, stakeholders, the framework and the timeline.
What remains difficult to reconstruct is the analytical layer connecting those elements to the final decision: the criteria used, the evidence considered relevant, the weighting of competing factors, the alternatives examined, the urgency identified and the reason permanent removal was selected.
Could an independent reader reconstruct the path from the identified problems and strategic objectives to the final decision using the public record alone?
Conclusion
The question is not whether problems existed
The WCA identified several concerns relating to Clock. SaveClock does not dispute that those concerns may legitimately form part of an event review.
The question is whether the available evidence allows the community to understand why those concerns, together with the strategic factors later described, required this particular response.
The purpose of this analysis is not to determine what decision the WCA should have reached.
It is to determine whether the available evidence allows the community to understand how and why that decision was reached.
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