Quote:
Originally Posted by Abhishek R
Oh man, am I a fan of the promotion/relegation system. As for confusion, there is precedence - I will say multiple sports and even some "eSports" use a similar system, and it works fine - it actually becomes quite simple to understand.
For example, in League, the bottom 3 teams in the League Championship Series (LCS) fight the top 3 Challenger Series (CS) teams for the spots in the LCS; to reclaim or debut, respectively. It's actually pretty cool, it ensures freshness in the league and allows up and coming teams to get into the spotlight.
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I understand it, to some extent, at those levels. Here's the problem I have:
How in tarnation do you deal with a team that just got relegated last year and now has 3 regional wins, one EI, and one RCA, or somesuch impressive resume? Do you put them in the relegated CMP or in the top CMP? Eh? How about the team that won the whole thing last year, and is nowhere to be found this year? Eh? Fair warning, I'm going to keep asking this until I get an answer. It shouldn't be all that hard to figure out--it'd happen often enough, no? And it's happened often enough with one CMP already, somewhat.
To put it mildly: Relegation works fairly well when there is NOT a lot of "churn" of teams joining/exiting a league--you can assign a team once, they go up and down, and maybe eventually they fold and leave completely. Relegation fails miserably when there IS a lot of "churn"--and in FRC, there's a lot of "churn" going to the Champs. The top teams will tend to stay the same and make a lot of trips to the top event (read: Poofs, Simbotics, HOT, etc.). The not-so-top teams won't--and that's where you have to make a lot of tough calls. Probably a third--a full third--of the teams at CMP this year won't be there next year. So now you have a new X teams to assign, and then relegate, that may or may not end up to be relegated in the long run because they just plain don't make it the next year.
That's why I just plain don't like any sort of promotion/relegation system from year to year. It's going to create a lot more problems than it's worth. Just assign based on "current" qualification (even if that's last year's award) and go from there. Sure, maybe you have one or two teams that switch due to not doing as well, but that's "normal".
One final thought: If some sort of promotion/relegation does happen, any and all talk about "reducing travel costs" needs to be expunged from the record, completely. If it is in fact cheaper for a team to travel to one event, but they are assigned to the other due to the promotion/relegation system, travel costs are not reduced. Can you imagine if a Detroit CMP-bound team ended up in Houston? Or if Mr. Forbes (just to pick on him) and his team ended up going to Detroit when Houston was closer? And if that wasn't just the exception, but the rule?