Future First Championship News

[jman4747]

Originally Posted by Siri

FRC doesn't come anywhere near a monopoly on technical difficulty (talk to Falcons about underwater robots...or, you know, watch the movie) or competitive experience (ever been to VEX?)

The reason I stick around as an FRC volunteer? I trust the program. Things like this...it's not even so much about the content, it's about the process. If you've been around long enough, you may remember the open letter for transparency for several years back signed by many if not most of the top players of the FRC community. People (and quite frankly, businesses), that put untold effort into the success of the program worldwide. You may remember the mass exodus to VEX when FIRST dropped IFI (FVC became FTC). This announcement, particularly as a gushing press release without addressing or even attempting to anticipate actual objections. This feels very much like IFI all over again.

You see what giving a preliminary plan for handling the expansion of the program gets them? This thread. If they had announced way earlier that this was the first step in making FIRST able to handle so many teams prior they would have had backlash, and yet the more you think about it the more you realize something like this was probably necessary eventually. The adding of more and more tiers to the FRC event structure is not infinitely sustainable and something else has to be done. It's just that they went for the harder sell first.

If you really think the excitement of a regional or championships is actually diminished by this than you really do care more about being the sole victor over literally everything else. Why? because the rest is still there! I think they knew exactly how we would feel initially and personally I think that the idea that this is bad is wrong. And besides being the best 3 of 3000 isn't all that bad compared to best 6 of 3,600 or 4,000 anyway.

And if you trust VEX just as much than why have you not saved the money and gone all in there? It's because the FRC challenge and community has it's own value that has been worth it along side vex, underwater, ftc, whatever. I'm arguing that A. this does not diminish any of that value and B. I'd rather the do expanded districts first before split championships but if they think this is a better first step than I can support that.