Quote:
Originally Posted by Zebra_Fact_Man
As FIRST grows, there will be more teams and more competitions, meaning more merit-based qualifiers/less buy-ins, making this whole topic a non-issue.
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Let's look at this statement for a minute, at face value.
Someone posted the numbers already. 366 spots are already merit-based. Let's go ahead and make that 364, due to two HoF teams also being Legacy teams.
In prior years, that's about 24 over the theoretical 340-team limit. This year, they upped the number of available spots to 400, so there are now 36 spots available for non-merit-based qualifiers (aka, buy-ins).
Now, there is already talk of two or three more regional events. Each would get 6 spots. That's 18 available spots for buy-ins next year/year after. Add three more events, and you are 100% out of spots for buy-ins with a 400-team cap. And, might I add, that's twice the size of an average regional event in each division.
Now: looking at the same math as before, 70% of the qualified spots were filled by qualifiers. Some years that's been higher, some lower.
So now, in a matter of a couple of years, you have no buy-in slots, and you have a chance that you get all of the qualifiers so no waitlist teams get in. A couple years after that, and not only do you have no buy-in slots, but you may be denying spots to teams that did qualify--there just isn't enough space.
I don't think this is a non-issue. I don't think this is a broken system right now, but I certainly don't think everyone is getting worked up over nothing. We're looking a few short years into the future and seeing that it
will be broken then due to too many qualifiers, and starting the discussion
now so we don't have to deal with it
then. Aside from the whole "so-and-so is the best robot and won't be at Champs" discussion, which IRI so handily provides an answer for. (Don't tell FIRST, but the Championship is a qualifier for IRI.
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