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-   -   [FRC Blog] Inter-District Play for 2015 (http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/showthread.php?t=130580)

Tartan47 22-09-2014 23:04

Re: [FRC Blog] Inter-District Play for 2015
 
*Note, everything below is hypothetical/personal observations. I don't have any actual knowledge of Illinois FIRST or Chicago teams decisions or input.*

TL/DR Summary: I am personally in favor of the switch to districts. However, I think Illinois has some hurdles to overcome first. Mainly the increased cost for many teams and the geographic distribution of teams in Illinois.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Alpha Beta (Post 1401081)
Put two district events in Chicago, different venues, at least one off weekend in between.

If Illinois made the switch for 2015, independent of Indiana, I would expect 3 district events and a DCMP. I am basing this on the same layout Indiana has since Illinois had 59 teams last year and Indiana had 52. I'm also assuming the 3rd district event would be the former CIR regional. The scenario you laid out above would alleviate any additional district event costs for teams based in the city of Chicago. However, there are 2 further issues with this scenario


1)Illinois had 30 teams in 2014, or over 50%, who attended only 1 regional. Under districts those teams must come up with anadditional $4,000 (or $5,000?) for DCMP registration if they want to make it to CMP. Within those 30 teams, 13 are located within the city of Chicago. If one of those teams qualified for DCMP, they now need to come up with an additional 4 or 5,000 as well as travel costs for DCMP. (Since I'm doubtful the rest of the state would be happy with 2 districts and DCMP in Chicago).

2) All teams from the rest of the state must now travel to Chicago for at least 1 district. This includes about 9 teams from closer to Saint Louis who now have travel costs for 2 districts.

No matter where the districts and DCMP were located, if Illinois switched for the 2015 season a decent amount of teams in Illinois would feel they are getting screwed and I predict our FRC team numbers would decrease from the 59 teams in 2014.

As I said earlier, I personally want districts to happen but I also personally don't believe Illinois is ready yet.

Andrew Schreiber 23-09-2014 10:44

Re: [FRC Blog] Inter-District Play for 2015
 
Quote:

Originally Posted by Tartan47 (Post 1401122)
*Note, everything below is hypothetical/personal observations. I don't have any actual knowledge of Illinois FIRST or Chicago teams decisions or input.*

TL/DR Summary: I am personally in favor of the switch to districts. However, I think Illinois has some hurdles to overcome first. Mainly the increased cost for many teams and the geographic distribution of teams in Illinois.



If Illinois made the switch for 2015, independent of Indiana, I would expect 3 district events and a DCMP. I am basing this on the same layout Indiana has since Illinois had 59 teams last year and Indiana had 52. I'm also assuming the 3rd district event would be the former CIR regional. The scenario you laid out above would alleviate any additional district event costs for teams based in the city of Chicago. However, there are 2 further issues with this scenario


1)Illinois had 30 teams in 2014, or over 50%, who attended only 1 regional. Under districts those teams must come up with anadditional $4,000 (or $5,000?) for DCMP registration if they want to make it to CMP. Within those 30 teams, 13 are located within the city of Chicago. If one of those teams qualified for DCMP, they now need to come up with an additional 4 or 5,000 as well as travel costs for DCMP. (Since I'm doubtful the rest of the state would be happy with 2 districts and DCMP in Chicago).

2) All teams from the rest of the state must now travel to Chicago for at least 1 district. This includes about 9 teams from closer to Saint Louis who now have travel costs for 2 districts.

No matter where the districts and DCMP were located, if Illinois switched for the 2015 season a decent amount of teams in Illinois would feel they are getting screwed and I predict our FRC team numbers would decrease from the 59 teams in 2014.

As I said earlier, I personally want districts to happen but I also personally don't believe Illinois is ready yet.

Point of data for your consideration: Average travel distance to the 2 closest 2015 events for 2014 IN teams is the furthest among all districts.

(all distances in miles)
MAR: 17, 23
NE: 20, 35
FIM 20, 41
PNW 31, 55
IN: 35, 65

Blah blah blah, straight line distances, blah blah treated earth as a sphere with constant radius which is TECHNICALLY incorrect but close enough for government work.

Mark McLeod 23-09-2014 12:18

Re: [FRC Blog] Inter-District Play for 2015
 
Quote:

Originally Posted by Andrew Schreiber (Post 1401162)
blah blah treated earth as a sphere with constant radius which is TECHNICALLY incorrect but close enough for government work.

Actually, the government uses WGS-84.

Ernst 23-09-2014 12:57

Re: [FRC Blog] Inter-District Play for 2015
 
Quote:

Originally Posted by Tartan47 (Post 1401122)
*Note, everything below is hypothetical/personal observations. I don't have any actual knowledge of Illinois FIRST or Chicago teams decisions or input.*

TL/DR Summary: I am personally in favor of the switch to districts. However, I think Illinois has some hurdles to overcome first. Mainly the increased cost for many teams and the geographic distribution of teams in Illinois.



If Illinois made the switch for 2015, independent of Indiana, I would expect 3 district events and a DCMP. I am basing this on the same layout Indiana has since Illinois had 59 teams last year and Indiana had 52. I'm also assuming the 3rd district event would be the former CIR regional. The scenario you laid out above would alleviate any additional district event costs for teams based in the city of Chicago. However, there are 2 further issues with this scenario


1)Illinois had 30 teams in 2014, or over 50%, who attended only 1 regional. Under districts those teams must come up with anadditional $4,000 (or $5,000?) for DCMP registration if they want to make it to CMP. Within those 30 teams, 13 are located within the city of Chicago. If one of those teams qualified for DCMP, they now need to come up with an additional 4 or 5,000 as well as travel costs for DCMP. (Since I'm doubtful the rest of the state would be happy with 2 districts and DCMP in Chicago).

2) All teams from the rest of the state must now travel to Chicago for at least 1 district. This includes about 9 teams from closer to Saint Louis who now have travel costs for 2 districts.

No matter where the districts and DCMP were located, if Illinois switched for the 2015 season a decent amount of teams in Illinois would feel they are getting screwed and I predict our FRC team numbers would decrease from the 59 teams in 2014.

As I said earlier, I personally want districts to happen but I also personally don't believe Illinois is ready yet.

Illinois is, by my estimation, on the upper edge of a range for 3 district events. If they have 40 team Districts, there will only be two open spots after everyone gets their two plays. Add a few more teams and they'll have to jump to 4 Districts, possibly two in Chicago, one in Peoria, and one in Springfield? And then host the DCMP in the farthest SW suburb of Chicago that still has facilities for the event.

My biggest personal concern in this discussion is what happens to Wisconsin teams. We're already in a rough spot this year. Our team is based out of Catholic schools, so week 6 events, like Midwest, conflict with Holy Week. We could attend a Week 1 in Duluth, a Week 2 in Pittsburgh, a Week 3 in Kansas City, or a Week 5 in Cleveland. The shortest drive that we're looking at is 6 hours, even though there will be several close events that we can't attend because of scheduling. Boilermaker is now off the table, and with Midwest, Central IL, Twin Cities, and Duluth potentially off the table over the next few years, we might either have to get used to driving a lot or try to start at least 20 new teams.

A Wisconsin-Illinois combined District doesn't make sense, because both states have a lot of teams centered around their biggest cities and then scattered teams that would have to drive a lot to attend their second event and the DCMP.

Andrew Schreiber 23-09-2014 13:41

Re: [FRC Blog] Inter-District Play for 2015
 
Quote:

Originally Posted by Mark McLeod (Post 1401181)
Actually, the government uses WGS-84.

... it's a saying.

[Warning, the following will sound like gibberish to most folks]

Data was generated by putting your team locations file into a postgis database. I then geocoded all the events and placed them in another table. From there, in a fit of deciding I genuinely hated databases, I joined team each team to every event and computed a travel distance using postgis ST_Distance_Sphere. After storing the resulting table I was able to query to find the nearest 2 events for all district teams.

In retrospect I should have used ST_Distance instead. I think, however, that when I created my events table I used the wrong SRID on the event's location Point and as such had to do some translation that I was not feeling up to at the time.

So, I could get more accurate results but I'm fairly certain that the minor inaccuracy in miles is less important than the inaccuracy caused by the fact that it computes distance as the crow flies.

Mark McLeod 23-09-2014 14:05

Re: [FRC Blog] Inter-District Play for 2015
 
I think the error due to the oblate spheroid approximation would be maybe .3% at most, so don't obsess about it.
At the greatest distance, that you happen to be dealing with, you'd see a different of 1000 feet or so.
Much less than the accuracy of the numbers you published.

connor.worley 23-09-2014 15:31

Re: [FRC Blog] Inter-District Play for 2015
 
I think we'll see a lot of district teams on Einstein this year. The average regional team just can't get the same amount of drive time without investing a lot into a season.

Lil' Lavery 23-09-2014 15:37

Re: [FRC Blog] Inter-District Play for 2015
 
Quote:

Originally Posted by connor.worley (Post 1401210)
I think we'll see a lot of district teams on Einstein this year. The average regional team just can't get the same amount of drive time without investing a lot into a season.

I don't think this change will contribute to that much at all. Michigan and PNW last year was the first time there really are that many additional play spots available in a district, since the district quantity is set by the amount of teams in the distrct. PNW is still relatively isolated compared to other districts, so I'm skeptical we'll see many teams travelling to there from other districts. Additionally, one of the big incentives for district teams to attend events outside of their district was qualifying directly for Championship. While a handful of teams do it primarily for travel purposes (such as 341), there are others who view it as an opportunity to qualify for St. Louis (especially in MAR). When all is said and done, I anticipate very few inter-district plays occuring in 2015. And I also expect Michigan will continue to inflate district success on Einstein.

mwmac 23-09-2014 16:19

Re: [FRC Blog] Inter-District Play for 2015
 
Quote:

Originally Posted by Lil' Lavery (Post 1401212)
I don't think this change will contribute to that much at all. Michigan and PNW last year was the first time there really are that many additional play spots available in a district, since the district quantity is set by the amount of teams in the distrct. PNW is still relatively isolated compared to other districts, so I'm skeptical we'll see many teams travelling to there from other districts. Additionally, one of the big incentives for district teams to attend events outside of their district was qualifying directly for Championship. While a handful of teams do it primarily for travel purposes (such as 341), there are others who view it as an opportunity to qualify for St. Louis (especially in MAR). When all is said and done, I anticipate very few inter-district plays occuring in 2015. And I also expect Michigan will continue to inflate district success on Einstein.

I believe Mr. Worley might be referring to the disparity in plays/drive time between a team that qualifies for Champs by competing at and winning a single regional event vs a district team that will have played in three events (two district events and district championships) before going to St. Louis.

I am willing to bet a corndog that some regional teams might even be willing to pay $1000.00 for the privilege of playing at a regional even if they were excluded from qualifying for Champs at said event just to test their robots, drivers and strategy.

MARS_James 23-09-2014 17:00

Re: [FRC Blog] Inter-District Play for 2015
 
Quote:

Originally Posted by connor.worley (Post 1401210)
I think we'll see a lot of district teams on Einstein this year. The average regional team just can't get the same amount of drive time without investing a lot into a season.

Hmmm lets look at some fun stats for Einstein teams:

2014:
254-Regional
*469-District
**2848-Regional
***74-District
1678-Regional
*1114-Regional
**1640-District
***5136-Regional
2590-District
*1625-Regional
**1477-Regional
***3467-District
67-District
*973-Regional
**2481-Regional
***2363-Regional

So looking at last year we have 6/16 slots held by district teams or 37.5%, Alliance captains were 50%, First picks 25%, Second picks 25%, Third Picks 50% so in terms of the teams who actually played on Einstein it drops to 4/12 or 33%. I am not sure that this change will cause that big of an issue, and I plan on checking to see if this hold true in other games.

Breakdown of Einstein Locations for 2014:
California-4
FiM-3
MAR-2
Illinois-2
Texas-1
Ontario-1
Texas-1
NE FIRST-1
Virginia-1

Link07 23-09-2014 17:16

Re: [FRC Blog] Inter-District Play for 2015
 
At least for MAR, which has been consistently putting teams on Einstein every year since its foundation, none of the Einstein teams participated in third plays that year.

I think that the majority of teams who do four events will be within the district or trying to qualify for champs at outside regionals (of which we we had more teams than we did allocated point slots last year)

Lil' Lavery 23-09-2014 17:57

Re: [FRC Blog] Inter-District Play for 2015
 
When discussing districts and Einstein appearances, it's important to note that Michigan was incredibly successful at reaching Einstein prior to districts as well.
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...ad.php?t=77045

Aren Siekmeier 17-10-2014 01:32

Re: [FRC Blog] Inter-District Play for 2015
 
Quote:

Originally Posted by IKE (Post 1401017)
In 2013, Bedford comprised mostly of 3rd event teams.

With Bedford week 6 this year, and 20 out of 30 spots remaining after second event registration, it looks like most of the teams there won't be earning points again.

Barring any surge in new team registration before 3rd event and inter-district registration opens.

Alex2614 21-01-2015 23:19

Re: [FRC Blog] Inter-District Play for 2015
 
Quote:

Originally Posted by Andrew Schreiber (Post 1401193)
... it's a saying.

[Warning, the following will sound like gibberish to most folks]

Data was generated by putting your team locations file into a postgis database. I then geocoded all the events and placed them in another table. From there, in a fit of deciding I genuinely hated databases, I joined team each team to every event and computed a travel distance using postgis ST_Distance_Sphere. After storing the resulting table I was able to query to find the nearest 2 events for all district teams.

In retrospect I should have used ST_Distance instead. I think, however, that when I created my events table I used the wrong SRID on the event's location Point and as such had to do some translation that I was not feeling up to at the time.

So, I could get more accurate results but I'm fairly certain that the minor inaccuracy in miles is less important than the inaccuracy caused by the fact that it computes distance as the crow flies.

Ugh and I don't even like doing my GIS homework. I do FIRST to get away from that :P

tStano 22-01-2015 00:13

Re: [FRC Blog] Inter-District Play for 2015
 
To me (a student on a regional team from Wisconsin), one of the huge advantages I saw to districts was that it was unbelievably fair.

For the registration fee of 1 regional, you got all the qualification possibilities of someone who went to 3 districts. The unbag time was the same, etc, etc. This is untrue in regionals. You can attend as many as you can sign up for, and you get a shot at each one. You can buy robot work time and chances at championships, (i suppose with waitlist, you can buy trips to championships too, so this argument is weak...). Now, with this new thing, you can go to a week 1 or 2 district somewhere else and get your robot tuned up before you compete for real. You've bought robot work time; an advantage over teams with less money. This isn't a huge disadvantage to the system, and its probably worth it, and my opinion means nothing, but its the first thing I thought when I read this thread.

Another thing. Switching to the district model, having everyone in it, and having all district interdistrict play count would essentially end up with what we have now, with one more tier of competition, except the districts are held mostly in gyms, and we lose much of the spectator aspect we've been working so hard to build.


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