Waitlist policy change
 

I have many concerns about the proposed 2017+ championship format, but one of my biggest ones is the fact that the competitive strength of the championship will almost certainly become appreciably weaker than the district championships. To combat this, I propose the following waitlist policy:
Eliminate championship waitlist spots, and allow waitlist entries into DCMPs

We already have had this drop in competition in previous years, MSC has consistently had more competitive qualification rounds than championship divisional level qualification rounds. It doesn't make any sense to me that the level of competition should drop as teams move up to a higher level of competition.

This year, approximately 200 of the 2900 active FRC teams will be getting in to championships off of the waitlist. This amounts to 7% of teams. If each district region allowed 7% of the teams in their region to qualify for DCMP off of a waitlist, just as many waitlist teams would get to experience a "championship" event as the current system allows.

My ideal implementation would actually be a hybrid implementation with the current point qualification system. For example, allow 90% of the capacity for DCMP to be filled by the highest point-scoring teams as in the current system. However, for the remaining 10%, multiply each team's district points by the number of years since that team has been to championships. The teams that have the highest scores with this new metric also qualify. In this way, teams still have to do reasonably well to attend DCMP, but it will eventually invite every team to the DCMP event.

I did not factor regionals into this discussion since regionals will be largely obsolete in the near future.

Re: Waitlist policy change
 

In a manner of speaking, isn't the entire manner by which teams qualify to attend a district championship a waitlist?

Have any of the district championships ever occurred with fewer teams than their capacity might allow?

Re: Waitlist policy change
 

MAR just did. I think I remember a few other cases: teams just don't get invited quickly enough. The last team to make MAR this year got called 10:30am Thursday morning.

Re: Waitlist policy change
 

Where did you come up with the 200 teams qualifying via the lottery this year?

30 pre-qualified teams (could have been up to 35)
169 District teams (This number would not change as a decline is passed to the next highest ranked team)
336 Regional teams (Due to the expanded wild card system very few spots would not be awarded since there would need to be 4 wild cards to create an unusable wild card so for practical purposes this number will only shrink due to declines)

That adds up to 535 qualifying spots, or only 65 spots available for the lottery initially.

Of course those teams that qualified via the Regional System can decline and that slot is added to the lottery slots.

I'm not sure how many teams decline in the PNW it has been roughly 10%. So if 10% of the regional teams decline that would make for 99 lottery spots. If it was 20% then it would be 133 lottery spots. I do not believe that 40% of the regional teams decline their spot which is what would be required for there to be aprox 200 teams that made their way in through the lottery.

Had FIRST gone with their other proposal of 540 teams then there would have been the following qualifying spots.

30 pre-qual (out of 35 potential)
152 District
336 Regional
518 qualifying spots which would have left only 22 initial lottery spots.

As you implied FIRST wants to do away with Regionals and they currently allocate the spots a district has to award based on the percentage of teams served by a district multiplied by the available spots at CMP. So the only way that more teams will make it in via the lottery (which is what we have now, not a waitlist) is by the number of lottery spots that FIRST sets aside.

Of course it is highly unlikely that most areas will be in the district system for 2017 because there are way to many people out there who are either fighting it or are not willing to step up and make it happen.

Re: Waitlist policy change
 

Last year, championships was a 400 team event, and only a small handful of them got in based on the lottery system. I assumed that a large majority of the extra 200 spots this year would come from the waitlist.

However, I now realize that this is an incredibly flawed assumption because of the reasons you listed above. Regardless, FIRST appears to be attempting to grow the waitlist spots available for championships, and I would very much prefer this alternative to more waitlist spots.

Re: Waitlist policy change
 

Districts got more slots this year because district slots are based on the percentage of teams districts have in FRC as a whole.