3 different things have happened that all have kinda sucked
1) in 2012, our pneumatics failed after Quarterfinal 1 at World champs, making it so we couldn't deploy our multitool, making our turrent not be able to rotate, making shooting and collecting hard... our alliance had already almost beaten our opponents, and probably could have beaten them if we had been working properly. the opposing alliance was 1114, 2056, and 4334, the winners of our field that year.
2) For both years that the District model has existed in the PNW, we have not been picked for elims, despite being ranked 17th this year
3) to expand on 2014, at some point during the Auburn District event, our electronics started to fail. it wasn't too bad, but we sometimes stopped working for 30 seconds or so during a match (we still managed to make it to Finals as the 6th seed- 3663's- first pick). at DCMP, it was terrible, with us not working for more than half a minute in every one of our matches, and our auto messing up. we finally identified and fixed the problem, but it was too late for me to be able to convince teams to pick us, and we narrowly avoided qualification to worlds. Our robot was probably in the top 5 best PNW robots for that year, disregarding the electronics issues... our method of defense (high speed ramming to dislodge balls) even cause a rule tightening on high speed collisions
The thing about all of these bad experiences, is that only one of them made me truly feel bad (not getting picked this year; many other teams too were surprised)- and even then we still barely made it to worlds, where we then made it all the way to the finals (again with 3663). the other two were learning experiences: Run pneumatics correctly, and make sure all the electronic bits work properly. Our worst experience, honestly, was probably 2013 (like many other teams here), because we focused almost all our resources into a climber that never worked on field