[Jeffrafa]

We had many similar problems for our team at the Pacific Northwest Regional.

Friday morning we first competed in round 3, which was announced as a win for us (17-6). We were 4-0-0 at lunch when the placement screen suddenly changed and put us as 3-1-0 without us ever hearing any reasoning. After talking to the pit administration and field officials, we were told sometime in the afternoon that this was because round 3 had been miss-scored and was really supposed to be a loss for us with a score outcome of 4-6. We questioned the scoring having been changed hours after the match but were disregarded and told that the judges call was final. This disagrees with the regulation that scoring disputes must be settled within minutes of the round conclusion - especially considering that there were no questions raised from either side about the outcome. This severely impacted our ranking at the time, dropping us from 2nd to below 10th.

After Friday's matches concluded the ranking for teams was also unavailable, leaving many teams including us unsure about our placement and unable to do our needed scouting research for the Saturday afternoon alliance selections. Friday night we found we were able to pull up the placement sheet online, but we were again shocked to see our record saying we were 6-3-0 when we had only run 8 matches during Friday’s rounds. Further research of the lists available online showed that we had lost a match that we hadn’t even played yet with a score of 0-3. This also affected our ranking, which would have screwed up any other teams that were resourceful enough to check online while doing their scouting research. Saturday morning’s match ended up being a win for us (25-23) after re-running the match due to field equipment malfunction and one of our allies unable to control their robot.

Our greatest concern was with the errors made during the alliance selection process. We were ranked 7th before alliance selection began, but as teams shifted during the first two alliance selections, we disappeared off the list rather than moving up. One of our team leaders immediately brought this to the attention of the nearest referee and a judge on the field without much response and after persistence the ref finally went to talk with someone about it as alliance selections continued. At the same time, our student coach who was in the pits watching the screen noticed and went directly to the pit administration desk where he was told that they would look into it. Somehow we reappeared on the screen when it came to calling the 5th seed alliance captain and we were called up, as we should have been. The problem with these multiple errors and not stopping the process was that we were not visible to representatives on the higher alliances who may have otherwise chosen us. Other team’s representatives were questioning where our team was on the screen and claimed it impacted their selection. Our team leaders went to speak with the head computer person as soon as possible. No one could figure out how the error had occurred. At the same time, another team also came to report that they too had been dropped from the seed team lists at the same time. We were told that the alliances have been selected and they didn’t think there was anything that could be done but would discuss it. When we checked later during lunch, we were told that nothing could be done and that our team would receive a personal apology for graciously accepting the circumstance. Paul Shay apologized to the driving team while they were waiting for their first quarterfinals game.