Quote:
Originally Posted by EricH
I think it's the one it needs right now. Here's why:
Back in 2009, the wild card was implemented in Michigan's district system--but it wasn't called that. It was more of: "Michigan gets 18 slots at Championship. They will fill them with their state winners, RCA, EI, RAS, and enough other teams from the top of their state rankings to fill out 18 slots." In 2012, MAR got the same scenario: 12 slots to fill with their top teams.
As districts expand to more areas (and the rumblings are that there will be at least 2 if not more new district areas in 2014), this system will be going into place in more and more places. The Wild Card is going to prepare teams for this transition. Once FRC is entirely districted, the Wild Card will probably disappear.
The other thing it does is eliminate one of the "favorite" CD discussions that happens every few years about how multi-event teams aren't being fair because they go to multiple events and take slots away from teams in a region that should really go because... If it's a later-season event, then there is definitely a chance that the wild card will be in play, and a reasonable chance that it is used.
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The Wild Card would not necessarily disappear, I believe, but will evolve into an at large pool in conjunction with the evolution of CMP to qualify-only and the evolution of traditional regional competitions to state/super-regional multi-competition structures.
In the post before my Dark Knight reference, I talked about for the
nth time about the structure I find ideal for this utopia where the rivers flow golden with district events and empty into a tranquil sea of merit-only slots for CMP.
If by preparing you mean "making teams realize the added stress on merit qualification and not fastest-finger qualification will stick around" and by "go away" will evolve into the at large pools we see in MAR and FiM, then we're on the same page.
And I guess with the Wild Card idea afoot now CD can only deal with people making 10 threads about the remaining topics of: mentor-built robots, adults on the drive team, elitism in FIRST, the GDC didn't think ______ through and now we might as well dissolve as a team, and all the other topics that fill me with all kinds of
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Siri
I think this is still my main question about the system: why is it (seemingly arbitrarily) limited to such specific cases, and why does it so heavily favor later events, or setups in which winning teams happen to win RCA/EI/RAS and then RW but not vice-versa? Transparency would be really great here, IMO.
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I fear we won't even sniff a deeper answer until kickoff when the manuals are published.