Originally Posted by Gregor (Post 1270336)

Please read the first line of my signature.

Originally Posted by RoboMom (Post 1270795)

One of my hats was as the trainer and go-to person for the St. Louis Convention temporaries, ie, the "Event Information" booth in the lobby in front of the entrance to the pits. This is year 3 for me doing this job. They were asked non-stop questions over the 4 days by teams, and the public. We had various printouts of teams but it wasn't until Sat. that I saw your master list of all the teams in pit admin, sorted by geography and thought "there it is!" We spent way too much time flipping through divisions, through programs, through assorted lists. By Friday I would have traded my vest with 13 pockets to have a computer with a searchable database. We were slammed with these inquiries about teams just because of where this booth was-I have so many stories including crying moms. And depending on whether they wanted a pit visit vs. watching the team on the field in the Dome and which section to send them to there, guided the conversation. In addition, I would love to have a little more coordination between pit admin and the event information booth. This is doable!

I hate I am posting in the "negative" thread.
Can we make a "it's doable" thread?

Originally Posted by Moon2020 (Post 1270920)

Wow! Yes, it is doable! I hope the right people are reading these threads!

We apparently need several team database computers (for a few key Volunteers and a few self-serve computers) set up at the most strategic locations in the venues (entrance, pit admin, the two inspection stations, etc.). Maybe a few "FIRST Ambassadors" with maps to personally escort people to the locations as well, as many people were super confused in the FRC Divisions by the pit maps. I had to ask an RI to escort a very confused person to a specific team in our division.

Maybe you could use text messaging to talk to Pit Admin? We used text messaging to communicate between the Galileo field out in the Dome and the Galileo inspection station when robots were having issues on the field. It's not instantaneous, but it worked pretty well for us.

Originally Posted by Grim Tuesday (Post 1270926)

Speaking of texting, it might be worthwhile to ask ATT to beef up reception at the dome and specifically the convention center. TMobile and Verizon both worked fine but for all my friends with ATT, message delivery time was measured in hours not seconds.

Originally Posted by nuttle (Post 1271100)

It is really hard to justify a ranking system where wins and losses are not the top-line criteria, but maybe there is a way to reflect strength of schedule somewhere in the rankings. Individual team offence/defense can't be kept like the score, but maybe some scouting stats could be considered.

Originally Posted by DampRobot (Post 1271147)

At this point someone says that OPR should be used as the criteria for seeding. And then someone else points out how bad of an idea it is.

Originally Posted by nuttle (Post 1271100)

> I would much rather see eight 50-team divisions, 10 qualifying matches and a quarter-final round at Einstein.

This is a hard solution to provide, but this is an attractive way forward on what seems to be the consensus biggest negative and probably the only way to even incrementally expand CMP (not that there aren't other considerations that might preclude this). One possible approach would be to run two divisions on each field, one in the mornings and one in the evenings. This would shorten the days for teams and reduce the number of people around for at least some of the time, but would require more volunteers (possibly for two shorter shifts in longer days). At the same time, everyone would still be at CMPs and there would be enough overlap that it would be one event.

Originally Posted by Tristan Lall (Post 1271175)

I'd lean toward the opposite: 4 100-team divisions, each with two fields, preferably on the dome floor (space permitting). As long as we're satisfied enough teams are playing in the eliminations, it avoids an extra (Einstein quarterfinal) round of playoffs.

There would be a need for more volunteers, and of course more field sets would have to be used for competition matches.

Originally Posted by DanielCH (Post 1271176)

Two fields per division? Scouting your division would be doubly difficult.

Originally Posted by PayneTrain (Post 1271178)

In its existing floor plan configuration it may be difficult, but theoretically you could place them next to each other and play a match on one while the other one goes through reset.