Looking back at a couple of regionals I've been to where the negative effects of this rule change took center stage....
(1) New York City 2001 Regional: I can not remember the team off the top of my head, but this team was ranked in the upper half of the teams (but not in top 8). They were selected, I believe, by the number one ranked team. After a bit of confusion, they found the team representative, and they declined, thinking that another team would pick them (they apparantly did not think being paired with #1 would make a strong alliance). The student had
no idea that they could not decline. The announcer did nothing like ask "are you sure? the rules are ..." but went directly to the next alliance selection. Several other top teams, even knowing the rules, were upset that this team were effectively booted out of the competition for ignorance, asked to pick them, but were told they could not. It's too bad this happened, I'm not sure how eager this team was to continue participating in FIRST after attending the event.
(2) Canadian 2003 Regional: My team (639) was ranked #4 (plus or minus one), and we had our list of teams all worked out. We wanted to be paired with the #2 team, but not the #1, so we asked #1 not to pick us. Maybe that was a bad move, because #1 did pick us... Either because we asked them not to (and they knew it would hurt us) or because they actually wanted to pick us (which we did not know). So, we declined the #1 pick (to the words of "no we do not" which made me cringe and look away just before the crowd burst out into "ooooooooooooooo"). #2 could not pick us, and we were forced to pick our own alliance, after #1 #2 #3 picked the top 3 teams on our list. AND, the #1 alliance went on, I believe, to win the competition. So, the moral is, don't ask not to be picked
It might do you more harm than good.
Given that these types of things do happen, I ask, does the rules change work? In my opinion, it half works, but as you can see there are a lot of cases (I'm sure #2 here has happened to other teams as well) where it encourages emotions to fly and some not-so-picturesque results. Maybe someone can post some good examples of this rules change before I form and post my opinion on the selection rules change