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Originally Posted by KenWittlief
Should we allow one big team to build three or 4 robots, pay 3 or 4 registration fees, and then have 3 or 4 robots at each regional they attend instead of only one per team? Clearly the more robots your 'team' enters into a competition the better the odds of one of them winning. When you have a collaboration across 3 schools from the outside it looks like one big team.
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There are precedents for multiple teams from one school. Consider Goodrich HS (70, 494) or Emery CI (1219, 1309). By accepting their money, not just once, but several times, FIRST is pretty clearly open to this sort of arrangement.
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Originally Posted by KenWittlief
When 3 teams collaborate they are not competing with each other. It become us vs them - the collaboration is us, and everyone else is them. No matter the rational used to justify the collaboration, when you compete against those teams it feels like they cheated.
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That's totally subjective—you
feel cheated, but that's only because you aren't necessarily privy to the structure and organization of the team. In the case of NiagaraFIRST, they have explicitly decided to compete with one other on the field—and off the field, apart from having very similar robots, they act just as any other group of friendly teams would; that is to say, they share resources.
Maybe it
feels like cheating, to some interested observers; but is it cheating? Is it even a violation of some indeterminate intent? I certainly don't see anything in the rules (of this year's competition, or any prior one, for that matter) to conclude that it is even remotely close to cheating. Similarly, every indication from FIRST (with regard to their intent) has either been neutral or supportive of these collaborations—where's the violation?