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Originally Posted by Sean Schuff
Anyone else have thoughts on this or is this regional just a fluke in the pairings?
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I don't believe the problem boils down to just the algorithm used. There's a few tunable parameters in the generation algorithm and the setting of these will greatly influence the randomness. For instance, one setting is the minimum number of matches a team must "sit out" between rounds that they play in. If this is set too high then the generator becomes very constrained on which teams it can place in any given match. This is especially noticable at events with a relatively small number of teams (such as Midwest and Wisconsin). If they had reduced the match spacing, it would have been much more random but at the expense of some really short breaks between matches. I know at Midwest for example that we played every 20 minutes. It was barely enough time to make a few quick repairs and get back in the queue. It would have been really tough if that number had been reduced even more.
Unfortunately I think there's a bigger problem here: when you have 6 teams on the field at once, and you only have about ~30 teams in attendance, you don't have a lot to work with. Maybe FIRST needs to consider a game where it can be either 2-on-2 or 3-on-3 depending on the number of teams at the event or something.