Preferred Regional size?
 

Small Regional (24-35 teams)
Pros Intimate. Easy to scout. Almost garunteed to get into tournament if your robot functions reasonably well. Intimate. Alot more matches.
cons Quality of competition is thinnned out. A good chance of slim picking for second allaince pick. Very fast turn around time (little time to make adjustments or repairs). Smaller venue.

Medium sized regional (35-50 teams)
Pros Qualitly of competition may improve due to a higher amount of teams particularly in the playoffs. A little more difficult to scout but not all that much if your scouting team is on the ball.
Cons Quanity doesn't always equate to quality. Less matches. Not as intimate. Not quite as likely to make tournament.

Large regional (50+)
Pros Larger field could mean better competition especially in the tournament. Larger venues. Greater prestige from comming out on top of a larger field (?)
Cons Can be overwhelming. Tend to not be very intimate. Not as likely to get into playoffs unless your robot is at top form. Difficult to scout (unless you have a top notch scouting team). Once again quanity does not always equate to quality.

Re: Preferred Regional size?
 

Medium. We had a small (32ish teams) Regional last year, and I found it wasn't as fun. While I did like playing a lot of matches, it meant there were just that many fewer teams to socialize with, and less robots to play with. This year we had 40 teams and it was great. Big enough that there was a larger variety of robots, but small enough that scouting was fairly easy, and everyone got to play a good number of matches.

Re: Preferred Regional size?
 

The flip side is that those few teams who don't get chosen for the elimination rounds stand out. I don't imagine that would be a particularly inspiring experience.

Re: Preferred Regional size?
 

It would have been particularly ugly at Pittsburgh if there were 25 teams and one team went unselected. Talk about a long ride home.

Re: Preferred Regional size?
 

Heh. They went with seven alliances in the finals, so seven teams had a long ride home.

Re: Preferred Regional size?
 

How'd that work out?
If they were going to go that route they should have did what Waterloo did last year and go with 4 alliances.

Re: Preferred Regional size?
 

24 teams were at Pittsburgh. It was decided that the tournament needed to have standby robots in case any of the alliance bots broke during playoffs.

7 alliances were chosen using the normal playoff structure, but the 1st alliance received a bye in the Quarterfinal Round. Hence 21 teams were picked during alliance selections.

One team was not able to take the field for their Quarterfinal match, so the first standby was inserted in their place. There were only 2 teams that did not make the playoffs.

Re: Preferred Regional size?
 

Yeah, well, if there were six teams per alliance I would have been right on.

Jeez, you make three little arithmetic errors...

Re: Preferred Regional size?
 

Definetely like the middle sized regionals, AZ had 45 this year over 28 last year. As has been brought up, I didn't like the fact all but 4 teams got into the playoffs (ours wasn't one of them, but I still didn't like the problem). I'd say the number this year was the best I've seen the past 3 years, it ensures good quality robots in the playoffs (making for some exciting elimination matches) without forcing you to have an almost perfect robot to even try for the top 8. We also had many matches still (I think we had 9 this year, as opposed to 12 last year).