Future First Championship News

[Carolyn_Grace]

Originally Posted by Rachel Lim

What is my point, then? Challenges and competitions can both push people to do their best. They can both lead to incredible results. They can both inspire students. But they're very different. They attract different people. They inspire differently.

I mostly agree with your analysis between the differences between challenges and competitions, but what I don't agree with is how splitting champs into two events automatically places FRC into the challenge category, completely taking away the competition.

It's STILL a competition. FIRST/FRC has never said that they are about ONE winner. In fact, every year we have THREE winners. If we truly wanted the best of the best of the best to win, then perhaps we shouldn't call the second and third robots on Einstein winners...

[TDav540]

Originally Posted by Rachel Lim

When they said "change is coming," looking back on it, it could be interpreted to say FRC is turning away from being a sport to becoming a challenge. This is the decision FIRST has to make, and the one that we're divided on. Should FIRST continue to try and change our culture by making FRC more like a sport, or by turning it into an engineering challenge? Should the "C" in FRC stand for competition or challenge?

After considering this for a significant period of time, I'm come to the conclusion that, in my opinion, FRC still stands for competition. Follow me through the end:

District competitions still crown one set of champions. So do district championships and regional competitions. These are still competitive events, and make up the majority of the events in FRC. Are they the goal of the FRC super-elite? Not necessarily, but they are still an integral part of the FIRST Robotics experience, and I would easily call these competitions.

Does not having a single, world champion alliance make that big a difference? To some, for sure, but I still think having six or eight champions is nearly no different from four. Think about the Einstein finalist from the last season: sure they didn't beat the eventual champions, but I could easily imagine a world where that alliance squeaked out a F3 win. So two champion alliances doesn't bother me from that perspective: it still is a competition.

I agree with the idea that FIRST is moving toward a challenge-based game series rather than sports. Whether this is good or not is entirely up to the individual. But I still believe it is a competition. We still have two alliances competing, even if only loosely this year. We still name winners. We still aim to score the highest, instead of just achieving a time or a number. If the GDC ever makes the game end at a certain score, or stop the match at a certain time once the goal is achieved, then maybe we will have to consider FRC a challenge instead of a competition. But for now there still is an element(s) of competition, and I treat it as such.

[BrennanB]

Originally Posted by Carolyn_Grace

How? So many teams are deserving of HOF currently, and yet only one can be added at a time.

Two things have been happening annually in FRC:
1. More teams are added every year.
2. Earning CA at any level gets more difficult.

Perhaps poorly thought out/worded. It's not that there aren't tons of deserving teams out there. It just feels inconclusive, what if one region becomes/is stronger than the other? Maybe this won't happen, i'm not sure.

Originally Posted by Lil' Lavery

Bull. Ask if any of the teams from Michigan, MAR, New England, or PNW feel their Chairman's Awards have been devalued by giving out multiple at their championship events. The answer is a resounding no.

There is a big difference here... Districts isn't the final stage here. It's also not what I was saying. My gut reaction was that previous winners accomplishments would be losing value due to more awards being given yearly, not that teams winning would feel like their win is cheap.

Then again as we know winning becomes harder and harder each year, maybe after a few of the double award years winning the award at the event will have been harder than championships now.

After some further thought multiple HOF teams is probably not an issue.

Originally Posted by Carolyn_Grace

It's STILL a competition. FIRST/FRC has never said that they are about ONE winner. In fact, every year we have THREE winners. If we truly wanted the best of the best of the best to win, then perhaps we shouldn't call the second and third robots on Einstein winners...

This is also separate from chairman. All three teams have to work together to get the win. Still hasn't been a year where one team can 100% solo carry.

[waialua359]

Originally Posted by Jared Russell

Most sports with a "Hall of Fame" do not have hard rules that exactly N players be enshrined each year. Instead, they try to maintain an objective bar, and the precise number of new Hall of Famers varies from year to year (within some min/max guidelines).

Jared,
love this post!!

Why not have N no. of teams each year receive the CCA if they deserve it based on a criteria set forth by FIRST?

[EricLeifermann]

Originally Posted by waialua359

Jared,
love this post!!

Why not have N no. of teams each year receive the CCA if they deserve it based on a criteria set forth by FIRST?

This isn't a bad idea though I think they would have to stop having CCA's get auto bids into champs each year. As the number of teams with auto bids would potentially increase at too large a rate to keep that privilege.

[waialua359]

Originally Posted by EricLeifermann

This isn't a bad idea though I think they would have to stop having CCA's get auto bids into champs each year. As the number of teams with auto bids would potentially increase at too large a rate to keep that privilege.

Eric, I see your concern.
With the direction that FIRST is going increasing the venue capacity and/or having more than 1 venue, I could see it not being a problem, at least for now.

Karthik did some no. crunching on behalf of the HOF teams earlier this school year, where the majority of the HOF teams have qualified anyways without the status in recent years.

[xman206]

This defeats the whole purpose of the World Championship...How good would one feel if they were to win one of the two championships?

[Jared Russell]

Originally Posted by EricLeifermann

This isn't a bad idea though I think they would have to stop having CCA's get auto bids into champs each year. As the number of teams with auto bids would potentially increase at too large a rate to keep that privilege.

I think this becomes more manageable as a larger percentage of teams competes under the district system. Give each CCA team a 4 year window of auto-qualification, afterwards they receive some number of district points as a recurring bonus to compensate for their ineligibility* to receive the large culture changing awards.

(* officially, there is no policy that disqualifies CCA teams from District/Regional Chairman's/EI consideration in later years, and indeed, some have received EI since their Chairman's win. Unofficially, there is often some sentiment among the judges that it is time for someone else to win these awards.)

[Mullen]

Originally Posted by xman206

This defeats the whole purpose of the World Championship...How good would one feel if they were to win one of the two championships?

I'd feel pretty good.

[Alan Anderson]

Originally Posted by xman206

This defeats the whole purpose of the World Championship...How good would one feel if they were to win one of the two championships?

I've had enough time to think about this from many angles now. My current position is this:

From the point of view of a student who never knew a time before the championshplit, I think winning (for example) the "FRC North Conference" championship would feel pretty good. So what if the South Conference teams aren't there? It's still going to be bigger than the entirety of FRC was in 2000. Those of us living through the transition will feel the pain, but after it's done it's likely that the positives will outweigh the negatives for the majority of teams.

Having it be a net positive is very likely if we focus on the ways it can be so.



I would probably have been happier to keep a single FIRST Championship, even if it has to be smaller, if a lot of what makes it especially inspiring could be infused into the District championships. Unfortunately, trying to fill two Championships to the level of the existing one is going to make it more difficult to pump up the District events.

[Koko Ed]

All these people complaining about playing in a convention center were the same people who were perfectly happy to play in a Disney parking lot and are eager to go back to do the same again. I really wish FIRST stuck with the superegional plan but I'm down with helping them get their idea off the ground. What can I say, I'm a total yes man. I'm gonna do the best I can to get FIRST where they want to be.

[tedjtran]

The 2015 World Championship will have 8 subdivisions. Of those 8 subdivisions, a total of 64 alliances will compete for the title of "World Champions".

Being the college basketball enthusiast I am, I'm absolutely ecstatic that the playoff format of the World Championship is similar in size to the NCAA's March Madness. With so many alliances competing in one big tournament, almost anything can happen and that just sounds super exciting to me.

Hearing that 2017 will feature 2 championship events sounds like such a huge step down from what FIRST is doing this year. It just doesn't seem like a fitting end to an FRC season when there are 2 championship alliances.

I understand that FIRST wants more kids to experience championship events, but it also just seems odd to me to have 2 events located near the center of the States.

[David Lame]

I keep thinking about the anecdote, often attributed, probably wrongly, to Abraham Lincoln. The short version is

"If I call a tail a leg, how many legs does my dog have?"
The person he was talking to answered, "Five."
Lincoln responded, "No. Calling a tail a leg doesn't make it a leg."

I can think of all sorts of reasons why this two event model might be a good idea, but calling them championships doesn't make them championships.

ETA: And I suppose they could still be "northern division" championships or some such, but they can't be two world championships. They can't be two of the same thing that they replace.

[Dustin Shadbolt]

Originally Posted by xman206

This defeats the whole purpose of the World Championship...How good would one feel if they were to win one of the two championships?

I'd be on cloud 9...

[cadandcookies]

I'd love to see a world championship event return in coming years, but I'm willing to take at least a sip of the two Championship Kool-Aid before I spit it out in disgust.

FIRST is in a difficult position here. Some of it is their own making, but a large part of it is just being the victims of their own success. Volunteer infrastructure simply isn't where it needs to be in a lot of places to allow FIRST to run the program exactly how they want to (which is likely quite similar to that 2011 proposal). A lot can happen in five short years, and while I'm still not sure about the path HQ is leading us down, I must admit a certain amount of excitement to see what comes out on the other side.