So, has anyone heard anything official from FIRST about the Veteran/Intermediate/Rookie constraint that they sort of snuck into the "random" match pairing system this year?
As I've stated earlier, from the perspective of a slowly-improving, learn-as-you-go, student run team, this new system for forming alliances takes our low team number way out of context. I consider every team as a worthy adversary, and I base my evaluation of their performance on their robot, not some arbitrary number that FIRST assigns every team that registers for competition. Sure, some teams might have past successes (254 comes to mind
), but that in no way means that they will have a killer robot this year (which they do, but thats beside the point
). And some teams, such as us, haven't even had "winning" success in past years, yet they treat us like we are the same level as the Poof's as one of the elite "A" teams.
If I was a rookie, I would be insulted that FIRST only considers you as a "C" team and that you need an "A" team to help you through your qualifying matches to make sure you don't lose badly every match. I saw plenty of inspiring rookie bots at PNW, 2046 sticks out to me, with their awesome autonomous mode that worked extremely well.
If FIRST was really trying to make this whole qualifying match thing fair, in order to rank the teams, they should go around the pits, look at every teams robot and see how they preform in their practice rounds. (Oh wait, isn't that what the scouts already do?)
I really don't see any legitimate reason for the qualifying match algorithm that FIRST has in place, and until they give concrete reasoning for this dramatic change, I will continue to try and bring back truly random qualifying matches. My team still has another $8,000 worth of regionals to attend this year, and I don't want to waste all that money on a bum schedule that limits what teams I will be able compete with and against.
I guess we'll all just have to wait until Update #17.
Mike C.
EDIT: So I guess truly random isn't quite what I'm looking for, more like random, but with a reasonable amount of space between matches (Mr. Saxton, very nice explanation of the yours and FIRST's algorithms, even I understood it
. I really like the constraints you have in yours and I would love it if FIRST implemented it. Let us know what they say!). I don't see what's wrong with going back to the 2006 algorithm though. I understand that Hatch was in charge of it back then, but can't we just mimic that algorithm's results?