Quote:
Originally posted by mrd_udhs
The problem is not the code, it is the people that blindly follow the code. They could have shifted some of the matches around to avoid this mess. 
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Having run this year's scoring system at 1 regional, and last year's system at numerous events, shifting matches around is nowhere near as easy as it sounds for a number of reasons:
1. This year's system is SQL Server-based, meaning that there is no easily accessable table to go into and edit the pairings. It would take a number of SQL statements to change even one match.
2. Even if the match table was accessable, internally, a team "index" based on the list of competing teams at an event is used rather than the actual team number. This index is based on the physical order of team records in the database, and may not be consistant from one import of a team list to the next.
3. At the majority of the regionals, the operation of the scoring system is placed on one person. After ensuring that all teams have arrived and passed inspection, this person tells the scoring system to generate matches sometime Thursday afternoon/night. If this person was to go over each match individually and "tweak" things as needed, you are looking at several hours of manual labor just tweaking the matches, not to mention the time entering this information into the match tables.
In a perfect world, there would be the time and the manpower to figure out each match by hand. However, due to the ever-increasing number of teams, and the small group of core staff at any given event, this is simply not realistic. While it may seem that we are "blindly following the code," due to the logistics of the event, and the nature of the system, it is easier to follow the code, and perhaps tweak the code to get the desired result(which is being worked on, FYI) rather than eliminate the code entirely, and do the majority of the work by hand(and yes, I have both generated and "tweaked" matches by hand, and even with the system doing the initial generation, if hand modifications were done, that would be the majority of the work.)