[fredliu168]

I absolutely disagree with a lottery system of selection of Alliance winners for the world championships. The teams who worked hard enough to win the regionals deserve the chance to go to Atlanta.

However, I do understand that FIRST is fairly limited in terms of teams allowed for world championships. Why not just decrease regionals to create regionals which have more teams. This will limit the number of teams qualifying for the world championships. I understand there were 3 regionals in California. This could be decreased to 1 state regional instead.
I also agree with Bill's method of automatically qualifying the first and second member of the alliance. Although I think it is unfair to the third team of the alliance, much of the time the third team is considered to be worse than many members of the other seeds.

Lastly I would like to point out that FIRST may wish to consider placing the eliminination matches for VEX on the saturday. It could easily be placed in the morning before the Einstein matches, and probably before the finals/semis of the four divisions. This way, teams could probably have 6 qualifying matches instead of 4.