I'm going to add a couple stories from two of the off-seasons we attended/ran this year.
The first was
TRI (Texas Robotics Invitational), this event was provided free of charge to every team that registered and was built to promote the younger and less experienced teams in the state. We wanted everyone to be able to play in eliminations because for some teams this may be there first time being on an elimination alliance and that's an important part of the FRC experience and we felt we could give it to more teams. For that reason we limited the event to no B robots and exactly 32 teams (8 x 4 team alliances). We also messed with the alliance picking a lot. In Texas there is a pretty distinct group every year of who are the top robots, regularly 118, 148, 624, 1477, we love the top teams but it's easy to see how a final at 4+ events that puts the same 3 or 4 teams against each other every time could be discouraging to other teams. To try to even out the alliances and not have 1-8 and 2-7 matches so lopsided we instituted this system.
Quote:
Alliance Selection and Elimination Tournament
The top 8 seeds will be the alliance captains but their selection order will be randomly assigned. Alliance captains may not select other alliance captains. A serpentine order will be in place for first two selection of an alliance. The fourth members of each alliance will be randomly assigned to them from the remaining teams.
1. Top 8 Teams = Alliance Captain
2. Top 8 Team numbers are placed into a hat, the first team drawn is now the #1 alliance captain and allowed to select their first alliance partner from the pool of teams that are not captains.
3. This continues through all 8 teams.
4. The last team drawn from the hat is allowed to select two teams just like a normal 8 seed alliance captain and we continue back up in reverse order like a normal serpentine draft.
5. After all alliances have three teams, the remaining 8 team numbers will be placed in a hat and they will be randomly selected by the alliance captains in 1 - 8 order.
6. This will end with each alliance consisting of 4 teams. During elimination play each member of the alliance must play in one of the first two matches of each series. (In practice this means after the first match, an alliance must switch in the team that didn't play in the first round). Alliance captains must turn in a line up card to the head ref prior to each elimination match and may not deviate from that line up for that match.
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For the most part this system removes the incentive to seed 9th or 10th because you don't know who will be picking 1st. It also keeps most of the elimination matches closer in score. We also required that the 4th robots play in at least 1 match each round. Again this event was designed to encourage growth in the state and provide teams with a different experience. This is not how all off-seasons should work, and definitely not how regionals should work.
The second off-season I want to talk about is
RoboReboot. This was a much smaller event. It started out with 18 robots including a few B robots. The plan was to have 6 alliances of 3 teams and give 1 & 2 a bye. Their ended up being a team that had mechanical problems and wouldn't be able to play in eliminations. When this was discovered myself and Andrew Lynch (head mentor for 2587) decided to pull both our B robots from eliminations to make even alliances and allow all the teams to play. That was the decision we made and it would be perfectly reasonable for teams to make a different choice, countless factors play in to such a decision.
From event to event there are going to be multiple factors that play into how everything is run and in general all you can do if you don't like something is provide constructive feedback to the hosts. If you find out that some part of the event that your team doesn't like will be in place again at future events, you may not want to go to that event again or volunteer with the event and help improve it.