Mythical Six Week Build Season

[Lil' Lavery]

Originally Posted by asid61

The main valid argument I've seen for the "stop build day" is that it would discourage teams from going to Week 1 regionals. However, I argue that teams would go anyway due to locality and the fact that everybody has only had the 6 weeks anyway- it would change very little. However for teams that don't have the funds to build two robots and/or go to only one local regional, the benefits would be immense. Personally I would vastly prefer the extra time to drive, test, and improve things, as we usually go to week 3 and 5 regionals.

There are already teams that avoid week 1 events. Some do it because they don't like being "guinea pigs" for a new game. Others do it because they want more time. 1712 falls in the latter category.

While in a regional format, you can put a bad event behind you and pick up a clean slate in your next event with an improved robot. In the district format, if you have a really bad event, you've essentially condemned yourself to missing DCMP and CMP. 1712 learned that the hard way in 2013. We simply weren't ready for our week 1 event, and missed the eliminations as a result. Despite great improvements at our 2nd event, we missed DCMP because we had put ourselves in a massive points hole. We still competed in week 1 in 2014 because we hate back-to-back events even more than we fear week 1, we skipped out on the very local (and very awesome) week 1 event in 2015 and are doing so again in 2016. It makes much more sense for us to have the extra time to work on our withholding allowance and test our programming on our development chassis (as well as get some lessons learned from watching earlier events). Even if we're competing against teams who are now going into their second event, guaranteeing we have something functional prevents us from prematurely ending our season.

If bag day was removed, I anticipate this aspect would become far more pronounced. Especially in the district format.