Originally Posted by asid61 (Post 1604152)

IMO, FIRST is trying to give all teams the opportunity to attend Champs, but it's not their responsibility to pay for it. FIRST has extended a hand to those teams to give them the chance, as long as they can afford it, which I think is fair. That also might explain why the Champs lotto tickets stack up; lower resource teams that can't afford it one year will be more likely to be able to go in the future when they can afford it. And frankly, if a team can't afford to go to Champs many years in a row, I think Vex or FTC might be a better fit anyway.
I don't have the facts about how often Vex and FTC teams cannot afford the cost of attending their championship events in addition to building the bot, but I would wager it's a lot lower.

Originally Posted by BMSOTM (Post 1604269)

If the goal is truly to ensure as many teams as possible get a Championship trip every four years, I'd like to propose a tweak to the waitlist system:

Continue to calculate waitlist lottery entries the same as currently, except do not consider teams who have attended Champs in the preceding three seasons. This way, a team cannot attend via waitlist twice during the same 4-year student turnover cycle, ensuring teams who have never or have not in a long time competed at Champs are more likely to get a chance.

I think this tweak would better align with FIRST's stated goal to better spread out the Championship experience to teams who would not otherwise receive it.