User blog comment:Polysium/Asian Alliances vs English Alliances/@comment-86.59.165.71-20150120085324

As many others have said, the top asian players are definitely more serious about games than the English ones. For duels, however, the main reason is definitely time zones. The slots are set so that they are ideal for asian players: morning, lunchtime, after school / work. In America the third slot is at night, while Europe gets a mixture of night and school / work slots (midnight, 4am, 11am, 2pm... add one hour in with daylight saving). English speaking alliances tend to be a mixture of American and European players, so they lose people for all slots (the most manageable one for Europe is the third, when Americans are asleep).

Most important of all, the results for the inconvenient slots can be devestating. The alliance I'm in is based heavily on U.S. players, so we usually do well in the first two slots, so-so in the 4th and more often than not end up being dead last in the third. With so many points thrown away, there's very little margin of error if we want to get decent victory point rewards. Needless to say, if you are regularly unable to attend even just one slot, ranking is totally out of the question. With Nubee raising the point limits, even individual rewards are harder to get - and don't forget that for the inactive slots, even if you do play you won't be getting any help in fever time or chain. Being so handicapped to get both individual and alliance rewards, there's very little incentive to buy rods. In fact, all you need is a few unfavourable matchups and you're suddenly unable to get even the last SR card.

Under such conditions, people are a lot more likely to stop giving a damn and even underperform compared to their possibilities. I used to log in from work and spend all free duel points every single time. Now that I'd need a massive amount of rods to get the last individual SR card and would still end up being unable to max it due to the one from victory points being hopeless, I rarely do that anymore.

Sure, there probably are English NEET alliances who are hardcore enough to be relevant, but the vast majority just considers duels a pain in the behind. Top cashers aside, the number of alliances who do well at duels simply because of everyone trying hard is negligible copared to Asian ones.