[Alex2614]

Originally Posted by Siri

Honestly? Yes. Absolutely.

I understand where you're coming from, and I'm glad you have that relationship with your sponsors. We do too, for the ones that understand FIRST and/or us well (Boeing, Sikorsky, etc). But in terms of marketing? Public recognition? In terms of attention grabbing and press impact and sponsors just being recruited? The buzz word isn't "highest level of competition" or "Region". It's "World". And not just in terms of "Champion", we've seen it as "World Finalist", "World Semifinalist", and to a lesser extent with "World Division Finalist". Everyone that gets an award, that even gets to Worlds can potentially benefit from that title. We've also been "Regional Champion" and "Region Champion". It's not even close.

People don't care how many Champions there are--they rarely even think about it--they don't care how qualifying works, the don't care about the bracket or the snake draft. Headlines are built around "World Championship". The R in FIRST comes from things that are easily comprehensible to the public: that's the entire point and method of going mainstream. "World" is a very big one of those things. People that already "get it", people that can put this in the FIRST perspective, are not the target audience that anyone's worried about losing with this publicity change.

You can believe this about all teams, but realize that you're speculating. (Your language doesn't tell me that you are.) I speculate that it will matter, based on the way my sponsors jump at the word "World". To be honest, if we marketed Worlds as "only 1 in 4 teams gets to go", we'd lose a lot of interest very quickly. No one thinks "a quarter of teams make it" when they think "World Championship".

I'm also not sure how you're getting "10% of teams in the East get to go to the east championship". How can you make the point that expanding the number of slots at the "highest level of competition" won't affect recognition by invoking a slot percentage that's half of what it was this year? FIRST's goal is 25%, unless you expect it to be that biased against the East even with their attempts at balancing. (Or unless you mean that half of the eastern teams (in the southeast) actually go to Huston? I don't think that's what you mean, but if so, I have to point out that it's it's both a deceptive statement and an example of why this gets so complicated to explain without reasonable buzzwords.)

This is great to know. In wonder if HQ would be willing to poll these sorts of issues with FTC and (J)FLL teams. The ones I've judged seemed pretty inspired already.

There were 8 divisions this year. Twice as many as before. Now those 8 divisions will just be split up into 2 cities. If the 2 championships have 4 divisions each (with 400 teams each I believe they will), there are still just as many division winners and finalists as there were this year. Still just as many teams on Einstein as this year. You just have 8 winners instead of 4. Who was complaining when we doubled the number of teams on Einstein this year? Who was complaining when we doubled the number of division finalists? I certainly wasn't. And now we just take 4 of those fields and put them in a different venue. Market it to your sponsors as one world championship, spread across two cities. It's still called the "world championship" and the percentage of teams that go are similar to what they used to be.

Tell me how many sponsors were uninspired by a team that made it to the championship when there were 25% of teams attending before? Give me a concrete example of a sponsor that said "well 25% of teams get to go, what's so special about that? We aren't going to give you money." Because I can give you several concrete examples of exactly the opposite happening when 25% of teams got to attend before.

Give me an example of a sponsor being uninspired when we went from one winning team on Einstein to 3. Or from 3 to 4.

It's still the highest level you can get. Still a world championship event. Just now with 8 winning teams instead of 4. Spread across two cities.