Quote:
Originally Posted by AGPapa
Thanks for the clarification, I was under the interpretation that 11 and 341 would "black hole" their winner's slots. Was any information given to teams about this situation? Why does 11 create another points slot and not 341? Is it because 11 qualified this year and 341 pre-qualified?
In past years MAR has published supplemental rules; I can't seem to find them for this year, do they exist?
EDIT:
From the 2013 supplemental rules:
So if the rules stayed the same then their should be eight points slots.
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FIRST standardized the District Points System this year, so I wouldn't look to past district supplemental rules for any guidance.
My speculation: this is essentially a Wild Card Spot. If you look at the
FRC 2014 Season Wild Card Calculation Step 2 states repeatedly states qualified at a prior event "in 2014 only". So 11 would meet this criteria and 341 would not. The only difference for districts seems to be that the Wild Card is given as an extra points spot, not specifically the Finalist Alliance as in Step 4. In MAR's case, either calculation results in the same team: 484
Hopefully, FIRST clarifies this for 2014 and addresses it in the 2015 document. The District Standardization is new so there were bound to be confusing situations. If you look at the
Championship Eligibility, all District slot allocations are still listed as TBD. I also hope the Wild Card system in the future allows Wild Cards to be created for all prequalified teams. No team wants to be a "black hole" destroying qualification slots for other teams, (especially recent competitors they know & respect). The Wild Card was created to avoid this situation. However, as long as FRC has more Championship qualification slots than the max number of teams that have actually competed in a single Championship Event, something has to give.
EDIT:
This 11/7/13 FRC Blog explains the general principles. I think the key sentence is "Districts are able to send to the FIRST Championship the number of unique teams allocated to them using the proportional representation model, plus their unique pre-qualified teams." Again this is general idea early on, not specific to any situation.