Quote:
Originally Posted by PayneTrain
You will inevitably lower the bar across the board, meaning with a division that is inherently weaker (if you are adding any more teams to CMP, I'm going to wager the new average ability of a robot at the 400+n level will be lower than the average ability of a machine at 400 teams). Just like with the new college football playoff where there will be a 5th place team that wants to get in instead of a third place team, you could argue that any number of robots "could have made eliminations" if you are lowering the overall average ability of teams in the division.
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I don't think a drastic lowering of event quality is inevitable in the slightest. The assumption your post rides on is that we're letting the 1st through 400th best teams in the world into Champs. We're not. It's really more like 1st through 150th, then a more random distribution with a concentration near the bottom for rookies and weaker second picks. If we allowed more teams into the Championship that were in the middle tier, it's possible that the average strength of a team in a division could go up.
Also, what Kevin was saying is that there were another 10-15 teams that were almost identical in performance to those picked - these are teams that, if picked, could have won. He is not arguing that any team "could have made eliminations" if the bar was lowered - he's saying for a bar at its current height, fewer teams are making it into elims than there are teams which can clear the bar, so to speak.