Quote:
Originally Posted by Taylor
This is an interesting take. I'd put myself in the first group of 'some people' for the simple reason that in 2017, almost 400 teams get to come home to their schools/communities and brag that they were (at least) quarterfinalists at the world championship. This can lead to great press, great community support, great feelings back home in general.
I understand the traditionalist argument of this making the event watered down, and I don't disagree with that. But for the larger goal of changing the culture through grass roots, getting people back home excited about a local's team success goes a long way toward celebrating STEM.
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Yup, my letting more teams go to Champs and more teams into the elimination rounds (and more teams with a reasonable shot of making the elimination rounds, you're definitely going to have more happy customers. Of course you'll have those who don't like the further dilution of the product, but numerically that looks to be a minority, albeit a vocal one. (I'm a member if this minority, however I totally understand why FIRST would cater to what I perceive to be the majority here)
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As a few people have mentioned, VEX has been running a Round Robin since 2013. Here's a link to an archive of the 2016 Round Robin.
http://livestream.com/vrctv1/2016-wo...osing-ceremony (Starts at 17:30)
You'll probably get a better idea of how it flows from watching the full Livestream archive instead individual matches on YouTube. It's taken a couple of years for us to educate the community on exactly how it works and to get them into the action. It is definitely not the most intuitive format, especially when you factor in tiebreakers, to an audience who is used to a standard best 2 out of 3 bracket. When done well, it's the most exciting hour (would take much longer in FRC) of robotics; match after match of the best teams in the world facing off. However to someone who's not robotics junkie, it could drag on, especially if lots of delays/speakers are introduced between matches.
In general I'm a big fan of this format, especially for the strategy that it introduces. I'm sure teams on Einstein will enjoy the opportunity to play against every other alliance. Many time when 1114 was on Einstein, we almost forgot about the alliances we never had a chance to play. In 2010, both us and 2056 were on Einstein, a fact that I forget regularly since we never played them, and were busy strategizing while they were playing.