[magnets]

I can't say I'm too happy about the point system.

It builds on my opinion that the culture of FIRST has changed drastically over the past 5-10 years. It's less about robots/engineering/competitions, and more about education, spreading the word, and getting more teams involved. While this may get FIRST out to the public, it's making sacrifices to competitive teams.

This means that when you go to your district championship, you're going to have a rookie team, that's gotten lucky, and they have the rookie team bonus of winning an extra five matches, but they can't really play, so they end up on the winning alliance. Then, at championships, you'll have teams who can't really play either. Right now, with the current flawed system (this new one will only be worse), you have about 6 matches per championship division where an alliance scores less than 10 points. That means that there are enough non-scoring teams playing in eliminations, that in 140 matches there are multiple matches where 3 non-scoring teams are put together.

For instance, in 2011, the championship was (in my humble opinion) ruined by the whole will.i.am thing. They sacrificed the fun that some teams would have in order to spread FIRST. Again, in 2013, we had a pathetic 8 matches per team at CMP. Why? So that many teams could come, not to compete and to be the 400 or so most competitive teams there are, but to be inspired.

In pretty much every event, there are a handful of competitive teams that will be playing in elims for sure, and are usually alliance captains. My way of judging the competitiveness of robots at an event is the competitiveness of the last few picks. We're getting to a point where the cmp elims 1st seeded alliance's second pick is a below average robot, and worse than 100's of robots that didn't qualify

It's also possible to build a competitive robot without any engineering at all. Just put together the kitbot, wire together the control system (both of which have detailed manuals), and download an already written piece of software, no understanding of computers required. Bolt a tray on top of the robot, and drive in a straight line to the low goal, hit it, and the discs fly in. Make a passive ten point climber, and you're already in the top 50% for weeks 1, 2, and 3, all without writing a single piece of code, without adding a single motor, and only doing one thing (hanging) in teleop.

It all comes down to the balance of competition vs. spreading FIRST/inspiring new teams. For some people, the engineering/competing/innovation aspect is most important.