FRC Blogged - Championship!

[IndySam]

Originally Posted by Cory

Depends what's important to you.

Is championships a magical rainbow and unicorn filled experience that all teams should be able to go to, even if they have objectively awful robots?

Or is championships the venue for showing off the absolutely best robots to create the highest level of competition possible in order to create a sport that the general public would actually want to watch?

The "problem" isn't just the wait list though. It's RAS and to a lesser degree EI/CA. If you look purely at the quality of the robots, it's clearly less than that of those who qualified through performance. From a competitive standpoint some of these teams have no business being at Champioships, but FIRST seems to be pretty clearly on the rainbows and unicorns side, not the competitive side.

Well I leave aside the fact that the name includes Inspiration and not "putting on a good show"

The current system has always been the unicorn and rainbow side you speak of. Every year there are great robots, even top 5 or10% robots that don't qualify based on merit for many reasons, mostly bad luck, while many teams do make it by winning with a "golden ticket alliance" or RAS EI/CA.

I do agree that many of the teams have no business being there from a competitive standpoint, I just get tired of the waitlist bashing when they're a very small part of the problem. The entire system needs a major change if your goal is to get away from unicorns and rainbows.

But to be truthful my original post was a reaction to someone complaining about his experience being lessened by a small amount because others were allowed to have the same experience (especially when they got in on a RAS last year.) Probably not real GP of me but I have never been known to pull my punches.