[mtaman02]

Originally Posted by Waynep

I disagree with you on this one and I know a couple of the other top teams will agree with me on this. We played at Pittsburgh with only 24 teams and saw far more randomness than at NYC. We wound up playing with teams 3+ times either allied or against, and others none. Sometimes allied twice and then agains once, or vice versa. There were some teams that we never played with on a field. This could be great for some teams, but horrible for others depending on the alliance strength. Furthermore, this throws the "Random Generator" Factor into seeding for some of the teams. Top performers should stay on top, but there were some non-scoring bots and sometimes non-driving bots that made the top 8 due to their alliance partners performance. The Master Puppeteer Theory is something we partially believe, our first 2 matches were against 375, NJ #2 Seed, and our Regional Championship Alliance partner 2 years in a row. I'm in agreement with the other engineers/mentors, at smaller Regionals space the matches out further, even if it means playing fewer matches we should play at least all of the teams once.
Best,
Wayne

Wayne you can blame joshua who was behind the scenes putting all the figures in for the match schedule =).
I'll stand by my opinion that matches do need to be randominized and will settle on the fact the way FIRST and Hatch should do it should be changed. There have been some pretty good idea(s) on how this can be accomplished and when the end of the season thread opens up this should be one of the items brought up. Hopefully there will be more teams attending each regional so maybe there will be some more randominzation of a different way. And I also agree with Ken so he's not insane ;-)