[petek]

It's clear that most of us agree that this year's algorithm was a big problem and that our concerns were communicated through a number of channels starting in week one. However, before lambasting anyone we should recognize a few important facts.

First, and foremost, because of the efforts of FIRST, 4fx and their subcontractors, this year's field control and scoring systems were a tremendous improvement over previous years in terms of ease of setup, reliability and maintainability. One only has to look at how few matches had to be re-run due to field fault this year compared with last to see a clear benefit to the teams and event staff.

Next, according to "the developer", work started on this year's system in Sept. '06 and was completed on time and on what amounts to a shoestring budget, at least in the world of control systems. So, in four months they went from a GDC concept to delivery of the first system, and then replicated it in time to ship to the week one regionals by the end of February.

Finally, with regards to making a major overhaul of the qualification match scheduling algorithm, FIRST probably can't afford to pay for the kind of resources that would have been needed to make significant changes to the Field Management System mid-season. Remember that the people who would make that change were already working full-time fixing bugs that caused ranking problems and FMS database access conflicts - when they weren't running the field at regionals and providing field support. I suspect that the main reason we didn't see a big change mid-season was that it would have increased the risk of FMS failure at events and taken resources away from more critical tasks.

I've debated the team ranking philosophy with "the developer" a few times and at this point I'd say we've agreed to disagree. It's obvious that FIRST has to clearly specify to him what they expect for next year's system and I hope they do it earlier than September. It is not clear to me that everyone at FIRST headquarters agrees that this year's algorithm is all that bad, so if people want their complaints acted on, they should go there, not vent at the guy who wrote it.