Quote:
Originally Posted by Mike Schreiber
Edit: I totally missed Brandon's Post (not sure how) I completely agree with you and had the same thoughts haha
Am I the only one who is a little disappointed in this change? I understand the reason this was done, and I know it's not going to change back.
With certain awards I actually like this change. I like having 4 EI winners, partially because it is already basically (IMO) used as a runner up for Chairman's. Having 4 RAS winners is very encouraging for rookie teams.
I know FIRST likes to spread the wealth and the more people that go home with hardware the greater the feeling of accomplishment everyone has collectively.
My main point is that it is nice to say that "We were the best in the division." But that is so much less awesome to say than, "We were the best in the world." One of the highlights of my FIRST career was winning Motorola Quality in 2008 at the championship. I don't think sharing that feeling of accomplishment with 3 other teams would have had the same effect.
How will we ever know if we're better than the Cheesy Poofs? Or Simbotics? (Go ahead, tell me that's not what FIRST is about)
I also liked robot awards being on Einstein because you got to see robots you never played against (but were still competing with for awards). Now unless you are up for Chairman's or you make it to Einstein you are really only in a quarter of World Championship.
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While I understand what you are getting at I can tell you that one of the hardest parts about judging at regionals is knowing that there are deserving teams that you CANNOT give an award for. We agonize over that. And the events I've done have been small (most of them sub 40 teams) and we still agonize over teams that deserve to have their efforts and innovations recognized but we can't. I can scarcely imagine what it would be like if for every one team we couldn't recognize we had 10... How do I decide which is more deserving of a quality award; a team that designed their transmissions to be easily swappable, a team that did analysis on every part of their machine and optimized each structure according to estimated loads, or a team that has a process built into their workflow with several QA checks in place? Who gets the award? It freaking sucks to decide that one.
Instead of viewing it was sharing the honor view it as FIRST and the judges recognizing more of our peers.