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Originally Posted by pfreivald
I would absolutely hate to see parity imposed by knocking the elite teams down. FIRST is the challenge that it is specifically because you're not just trying to build a robot that can accomplish tasks, you're trying to build a robot that can accomplish tasks better than everyone else's robots.
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I like to think that the robotic aspect of FIRST is about students building robots accomplishing tasks better than everyone else's robots. Parity does not imply knocking the elite teams down.
Quote:
Originally Posted by pfreivald
I'll dispute it. "Fairness" is both arbitrary and irrelevant. You might as well complain that it's unfair that teams that know things about robots have an advantage over teams that don't. This undisputed "fact" is a "fact" only insofar as the statement "advantages are advantageous" is a fact.
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Student knowledge is much more easily accessible than cash. And the point of FIRST is so that students can gain knowledge. Most people here agree that robots built entirely by mentors give their team a strong advantage (though they dispute whether or not FIRST should be fair). Fairness is arbitrary, but not irrelevant.
Quote:
Originally Posted by pfreivald
There are already many rules that force some level of parity, from materials utilization to BOM cost restrictions to time restrictions. I'm willing to bet that if you tried to come up with more rules to enforce parity, in public on Chief Delphi, you'll find that it's a lot harder than it sounds -- and that many of your ideas will actually skew things even more in favor of elite teams.
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To enforce more parity, all they would have to do is announce "FIRST is primary about students. Mentors, remember you're only here to help, not do it for them". If they emphasize that philosophy (which would be great), mentor-ran teams would not disappear overnight, but their legitimacy would decline, and teams will change; the competition would become a much less hostile atmosphere between alleged elite teams and normal teams.
Quote:
Originally Posted by pfreivald
tl;dr version: Elite teams aren't elite because of the inherent bias of the system, they're elite because of what they do within that system.
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Plenty of non-elite teams do similar things as elite teams, yet aren't elite teams. This further illustrates that "being elite" is dependent on factors other than how well they do things within the system.