[Norm M.]

Did any of the other regionals have really messed up qualifying pairings? At St. Louis, we had one team on the opposing alliance 4 times! Also, we had one of our matches duplicated (exact alliances)!

I'm sure that this led to some nuances in the qualifying points, for a number of reasons.

If the opposing alliance had a robot (or two) that could not get over the ramp, the scores tended to be very low as the totes got bulldozed out of scoring position. Plus, with no ramp points for the losing alliance, the 2x adders didn't amount to much. In many ways, you were better off where the teams were good enough to get over the ramp and make some points.

We were fortunate enough to qualify well, but it's really hard to figure out if we did that based on skill, or just dumb luck! I hope that they get the random number generator restarted before the next round of regionals. I feel sorry for some of the teams that had frustrating qualifying because of the non-random pairings. Everyone should have 8 different matches to give them an opportunity to show their stuff!