[z_beeblebrox]

No statistics, but anecdotal evidence from our team at Hub City last weekend:

We missed all our practice matches Thursday since we were making some big changes to our robot, based on what we learned from our practice robot. Friday morning, we had various malfunctions (and a bad schedule) that led to us losing most of our qualification matches. At the end of the day, by the time we got our robot working well, we were seeded in the high 30's. Saturday morning, our robot worked great and we won all three of our matches and were seeded 26th. We were the first pick of the second seeded alliance captain, who had observed that our performance had greatly improved.

This was the result that we were expecting, as we signed up for Hub City as our "practice regional". We expect to do minimal robot work and play some practice matches at Arizona.

TLDR: Skipping practice matches hurts seeding, but not necessarily performance by the end of the event.