[KenWittlief]

Originally Posted by artdutra04

With the ever increasing amount of off-the-shelf resources, such as the IFI and AndyMark transmissions and wheels, IFI Kitbot frame, and the EasyC programming environment, it's becoming easier and easier for rookie teams to build better robots. Rather than seeing strict rules put in place to stifle the "better" teams, I would rather see more resources being developed to help rookie teams build competitive robots.

Instead of lowering a team's expectations, let's raise the amount of competitive resources available to them.

that is one way increase the level of fairness, or to have classes or levels of competition in which teams can play

you could either have a KOP-only division, and let the super teams play in a totally unrestricted class (use whatever motors / controllers / parts...) you want

or you could turn it around to take some of the restrictions off the smaller teams, so they could buy completed assemblys from someone else, and focus more on one aspect of the design: SW, control systems, auton mode.

My gut instict is telling me we could not (and most teams would not want to) limit the game in ways, so that all teams are more or less equal, and then have all teams compete for the same trophy: ie, only 8 students and 2 mentors per team, or all teams can only use the KOP and nothing else...

I think we would have to move in the direction of having different levels of play within FRC, so that teams can target the level/class they have resources and people to do well in - that means the expert/vetran game could be opened up even more: super-bot class, maybe with $50k robots playing for the top title.

Ali was the HeavyWeight boxing champion or many years, and Sugar Ray Leonard was the top of his class in boxing. They were both champions, but they never had a match against each other. There should be a similar path for FIRST to explore.

Originally Posted by Stephen Kowski

i don't know if I buy it....in our rookie year we went and won at the Peachtree Regional as a rookie with almost no money. I see teams all the time that I know (since I talk with them) don't have a lot of resources build great, competitive machines. ...
I think there are some hasty generalizations being made in this post that may or may not necessarily be accurate. Please consider this as you try to "make competitions more fair" because I think there is an issue with the problem statement that was given.

I expected there would be some contention on whether FIRST competitions actually are fair or not. Every kickoff meeting I have attended in person Dean Kamen makes a point of saying the competition is not fair, and that it is not designed or intended to be fair.

Some of the aspects of the way the games have evolved are not to increase the level of fairness, but intead to keep the games exciting, interesting, and to let the weaker teams stay more involved.

Originally teams played against each other, there were no alliances. Your ranking at regionals depended mostly on how well your robot and players performed.

But now with the 3 team alliances, your team only represents 33% of your alliance. A really good team could be matched with weak teams in every single match, and not place well in the rankings. Likewise a weak team could be matched with excellent robots in every match, and end up in the top 8 of the rankings, even if their robot never scored a single point all day.

that is one aspect of fairness that could be addressed. Alliances exist in part to keep every team engaged, but the result is that the team that scored the most points, or played the best defense at an event, may not make it into the top eight, then everything else is out of their control.

the other aspect is the resource and team sizes. The smallest team you can have is 4 students and one mentor (you must have 4 students on the playfield). I think it would be great if smaller Highschools could have teams with only 4 -8 students, and they would have a reasonable chance of being the champions in their division or level, whatever that means, without having to defeat a team with 60 students and 20 mentors and a multibillion dollar corporate sponsor.

I think the issue of whether FIRST is fair should be clear - when compared to other sport-like events and contests that students can enter. I hope we focus here on ways to open the competition up to more teams, so they can compete against other teams 'like them'.

that doenst mean we have to make it easier for everyone - we could make it easier for smaller teams, and make it more challenging for the powerhouse teams.