[Kevin Sevcik]

I'll have to agree with Karthik. The seeding is very important for ranking atleast the top 8 teams. A veteran #2 seed that has played and beaten all the other veteran teams at the regional with a rookie #1 seed that has barely beaten all the other rookies at the regional... That's just asking for trouble.

In addition, I can't see how a rookie team would prefer to be paired with and against other rookies for an entire regional. Many of these rookies were planning on being enabling robots to leverage the ramps and other features of veteran teams. Basically telling them that they'll never be paired with a veteran team just because is not a nice thing to do.

Mostly, I'm just surprised because the only serious complaints I've ever heard about the alliance pairing algorithms were that teams had to play with or against another team for half a regional or so. I can't really understand why first would turn around and go with a system like this in the face of that feedback.