Quote:
Originally Posted by JABot67
Two points:
First of all, I think that a major gripe a lot of people have about having two championships is that there would be two world championship winning alliances. I think this could be resolved by having the winning alliance from Houston hurry on up to STL or DET the next week to battle it out in an actual final series. This could address a lot of people's concerns about having more than one winning alliance. Most of the Houston crowd, however, would have to watch the finals from home.
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The difficulty with this would be ensuring that every winner from the first event can make it to the second. Currently, it's not a big deal if this happens from regional --> champs, because alliances are broken up and every team starts with a clean slate. If you're just going to take the winning alliance, you'd have to ensure that all members are able to attend, or else it wouldn't really be a true championship matchup. And the alternative, putting the winners in the mix with all the other teams, would obviously make the first event completely second class.
Perhaps a better model would be what VEX does with their "US Open" championship event. This event takes place a few weeks before the official championship, and invitations are given to teams who almost, but didn't quite, qualify for the world championship. The event is near championship scale in its own right, and gives teams that experience, but it doesn't suggest itself to be of equal standing to the World Championship. I believe that in the past, but not anymore, teams which performed well at the US Open could accept reserved slots at the World Championship a few weeks later, if the financial/travel burden was worth it for them.
It's important for us to propose reasonable alternatives to FIRST alongside our concerns, if we hope to inspire change. Clearly, FIRST perceives the access level of the championship experience to be a problem, and the current model to be unsustainable. I think that they've made a huge mistake in their solution, and we should work to figure out an alternative in the two years before the changes go into effect.