[cadandcookies]

Originally Posted by EricH

The big problem for Hawaii is getting everybody between islands for reasonable cost and in a reasonable time. If they could solve that somehow, I'm pretty sure they'd be doing districts as soon as possible.



cadandcookies, I think some explanation for the negativity might be in order. I'm not sure this would have come across very well in those older threads. So...

There were two big reasons for "We hate this"/"We love this". One was the sudden "These guys get to do this, they can leave their area but you can't come in, oh and they get double the plays". Other areas complained that MI got double the value, they'd been working on trying this for years and HQ said no, and a few other complaints. But the #1 reason was the suddenness (some would say sneakyness). Internal complaints from MI came from the UP teams about having to increase their travel just to get to district events, instead of just going to MN and WI like normal.

The other reason for the complaining was when the points structure was initially announced--it really didn't appear to value anything that wasn't robot (AKA, the CA...) With the years of iteration, that's been dealt with.

Now that MI (and now MAR, NE, and PNW) have had some years as the guinea pigs, most of the wrinkles have been ironed out, and other areas have seen how more teams have formed, and better teams, and are chomping at the bit to at least explore what's next in forming their own district area. International teams who play in the U.S., meanwhile, are getting mighty nervous about potentially losing access to their preferred regional when that area goes to districts. (And trust me, I find that having the Chilean teams in L.A. provides quite a bit of spirit, and is a good thing--I'd hate to see 'em have to go elsewhere.)

Thanks for the history lesson. I've been reading through some of those old threads and it's cool to hear some retrospective from someone who was there. Things can change a lot in half a decade. I'll be interested to see how much the model changes in the next five years.