Are 8 play regional reasonable?

[youngace89]

Originally Posted by Isaac Ash

My team's climber only worked once throughout the entire 10K lakes regional, but when it did, it was an incredibly exciting and inspiring moment for the team, and especially for those who had spent the most time on it.

Although I didn't build the climber, I would say that most of that excitement resulted from that climb coming in our first semifinal game, which we won by 10 points and would have lost based on the auto points tiebreaker had we not climbed.

I'll use that to transition to my main point here, which is that more matches are better... especially if they are elim matches. The greatest perk of a smaller event, in my opinion, is that a higher percentage of teams will make elims and have the chance to play a part in more meaningful games. Even if they lose in the quarterfinals, they certainly will have a greater sense of accomplishment resulting from at least playing a part in the most exciting and talked about part of the events, and they will have had a chance to work more closely with their elims partners than their quals partners.

Additionally, with fewer teams there will be more excitement for those who don't get picked. At a 40-team event only 16 teams don't get picked, so almost everyone is either in or on the brink of getting in. As a team looking forward, I would much rather see an event where more than half of all teams made it to elims than a 60-team sea of robots to be lost in.

This doesn't even have to happen at a real event. Increasing the number of offseason events will increase the likelihood that a given team makes it into elims at least once, which hopefully could give less fortunate teams a point to rally around, and validation that they were an important part of an event.