Quote:
Originally Posted by Mark Sheridan
I agree that eliminating the championship eligblity of the EI award would focus more to the competition. I just wanted to address the hypothetical situation of a EI award winner with a sub-par robot. I think that there are better ideas than this one. The EI award does have many merits that warrants its celebration.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by PayneTrain
Then FIRST HQ would distribute the slots to these remaining 326 (and shrinking because of HoF) regional boards to use at their discretion, with a few exceptions (i.e. the six traditional blue banner awards given at competition must be in your slots, unless FRC demotes RAS and eliminates RIA). It's like good, old-fashioned apportionment in governing bodies. So MAR, who has 100 teams this year (right?) would have 8 spots to work with however they wished after the 6 Blue Banner awards got their bids. They could give them to the next 8 teams in the rankings. They could send more RCAs or EIs or RASs. They could let teams register for the slots like we do now, or they could institute some sort of lottery a team is drafted into after their 3rd year away from CMP. Michigan would have 21 slots to distribute after the six BBAs. However, if 51 won MSC or 103 won MAR or 16 won GKC, they wouldn't be sucking away a spot from their competition and giving it to another random team. It would go to a team that performed very well over the year and earned a spot not needed by a team slightly stronger than them.
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I don't see anything wrong with EI or RCA winners who have sub-par robots. If we only allow great robots to go to the Championship Event we turn FRC into a robotics competition (my same concern with FLL, and with JFLL & FTC if I were involved in them, too).
Besides, what defines "sub-par" and "great"? Is the rookie team we drafted in STL last week sub-par because it couldn't pick up or shoot balls and was seeded in the lower half? Even though they have a solid drive train & a decent ramp manipulator I don't think they'll get picked as-is for eliminations in any CE division. But they have plans on finishing the ball manipulator & shooter that they didn't have time to finish before the STL regional & take it to the CE. I'm interested in seeing what they come up with; they could easily turn into an even better opponent-side robot than they were in STL.
The year we won a RCA & went to the CE (Lunacy) we had a very nice robot. Solidly-built, good-looking, and designed around a great idea -- that the Super Cells would be *very* important and that it would take a long time to move the Empty Cells from the outpost over to the corners. Our catapult could launch them all the way, without moving away from the hole in the outpost wall. We made eliminations in both regionals we attended, but our strategy was just too easy to disrupt, and that showed up in Archimedes. We based the robot on a premise that turned out not to be the case. I have no idea if we were sub-par, great, or what. I do know we weren't competitive at the CE level. But the design was good enough that we had inquiries this year from teams interested in our catapult.
I think PayneTrain has some good ideas, but I don't think we have a complete system yet. I'm not sure how the "6 blue banner awards" don't include RCAs, EIs, and RASs, so where the "...send more RCAs or EIs or RASs." would come from confuses me. So I'm interested in what was meant. I do like the idea of more Districts & using a point system that, for example, allows robots that deserve to go but got eliminated in the QFs to qualify for the CE. We just need to find a way to allow teams that almost got RCA or EI to potentially qualify.
Whatever method that ends up being used to select teams for the CE needs to continue to take into account that the word "robot" doesn't appear anywhere in FIRST or in the FIRST mission statement. I think it's very easy to get too caught up in the robot part of any of the programs (I know I slip there from time to time) but we need to keep in mind that the robot are the means, not the end.