[rspurlin]

Longtime scorekeeper here. As soon as the previous match is scored, we begin the setup for the next match. The major part of that is setting up the field access point to respond only to the six teams coming onto the field and to establish a virtual private network for each team. This is why you have no comms if you're in the wrong station. Station assignments also allow the FTA to see exactly what is going on with your team linking to the field by looking at the stack lights.

Schedule generation attempts to make a qualification schedule that maximizes the variety of partners and opponents, maximizes time between matches, balances appearance on red/blue and in each station, among other things. Giving teams the opportunity to alter this for every match not only makes my job much harder, but would likely slow down the process, resulting in fewer matches per team. There also seems to be an opportunity for better teams to strongarm a weaker team into an inferior position, which wouldn't be GP.

Many offseason events don't use a full FMS and instead set up shared networks with no VPN. In those events it wouldn't matter which station you're in.