Quote:
Originally Posted by seg9585
FIRST Choice is a bonus that has been added (did not exist a few years ago) that generous donors are providing for FIRST teams. The parts are mostly surplus from previous years and should be thought of as a team donation.
Our registration fee doesn't guarantee getting the best parts from FIRST Choice, nor does it help cover the PDV vouchers (except the AndMark one). These are all gracious corporate donations that we should be lucky to get. Registration pays for the teams to attend a Regional or District competition and receive the standard KoP.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by cadandcookies
As far as issues go, this is relatively minor one. I can see where that the opening being rescheduled might be problematic for some people that had planned to be on today, but overall I doubt it's much more than the teams who weren't going to make it immediately anyway.
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It's not free, and it's not guaranteed. But it's interesting to observe how framing it like a bonus changes (some) people's expectations.
As part of your registration, you paid for the chance to receive certain things. Treat it like the mandatory purchase of lottery ticket: from the entrant's perspective, it's not particularly deterministic. If you come in with that (modest) expectation, it's hard to feel cheated. (As a corollary, it's hard to be particularly excited about it either.)
Having said that, I suspect that making it transparently deterministic (except for breaking ties) would be a good idea. There are a limited number of items, and a limited number of teams, so doing the computations in several instant rounds is no big deal. Teams could select items, quantities and preferences (e.g. as preference points expressed as decimal fractions summing to 1). When it's time for the first round, it attempts to allocate teams' highest preferences (in order of most preference points expended). If there are teams who don't get their first preference, the teams' remaining preferences are normalized to fractions summing to 1. (So if you miss out in the first round, your preferences are strengthened in subsequent rounds.) Then the next round instantly takes place, and so on. I haven't thought this through in detail, but it seems to me that even if there are edge cases, they can mostly be rectified by offering teams variable-value PDVs and/or less-than-par fee rebates (proportional to the amount of unfulfilled preference at the end of all allocations). After all, even if you get no parts, it's harder to complain about a discount.
(I haven't reviewed the FIRST Choice allocation algorithm lately, so perhaps some of this is in place this year.)