Quote:
Originally Posted by Jon Jack
The actual purpose of the point system is to determine the cut off of who advances and who doesn't advance.
|
Jon is exactly right here. The purpose of these systems is to perform the difficult sort at the entry boundary to the next tier. The District system must sort the combined input from hundreds of teams playing 2 events each and determine who will advance. The same system is then used again at the regional championship level to determine who will advance to the world championship. While being on the top is great for bragging rights, it is functionally irrelevant: the only thing that really matters is 'who is in and who is out?'. The system is designed to take in 4 inputs from standard measurable items present at all FRC events: QP W/L/T results, Alliance Selection position, Elimination match tier reached, and Judged Awards received. These items are game independent and are portable from year to year regardless of the game design. Succeed at achievement in these 4 areas, and your team will rank higher than those who achieve less. Simple: do good things, get noticed, move forward.
While this is still new to most of the FRC, we are in our 6th year of deployment of this system in Michigan. The adjustments made in 2014 are fairly minor tweaks to original 2009 design. There is not really any problem with properly incentivising teams here.
If someone wants to post "worldranks" or the like, just relax have fun with the math. No one number can truly tell us how good any team actually is, but it is fun to try to find one which can.
"Measure what is measurable, and make measurable what is not so." -
Galileo