[FRC Blog]2017 Updates

[ollien]

Personally, I'm super excited to see this wild card change. As someone whose team has never been to champs, this gives me some hope for the future.

EDIT: I am curious though. If all 3 winning teams generate wild cards, who does the fourth wild card go to?

[Jay O'Donnell]

Not a huge fan of 6 divisions, I find the round robin finals in vex makes it less exciting so I'm not super pumped to see it come to FRC.

Huge fan of the extra wildcard at regionals. Should definitely balance out the regional spots at champs with quality teams that often miss out.

hopefully the scheduling issues with regionals in NY/southeast US get addressed in someway, but I'll take this as a win for today.

[BrennanB]

Originally Posted by Jay O'Donnell

Not a huge fan of 6 divisions, I find the round robin finals in vex makes it less exciting so I'm not super pumped to see it come to FRC.

Huge fan of the extra wildcard at regionals. Should definitely balance out the regional spots at champs with quality teams that often miss out.

hopefully the scheduling issues with regionals in NY/southeast US get addressed in someway, but I'll take this as a win for today.

This exactly. Definitely a more complicated system and not that spectator friendly compared to a nice simple bracket.

[AllenGregoryIV]

Seem like great changes to me, very happy with 6 subdivisions at each championship and a round robin Einstein.

Anyone want to do the math on how the extra wildcard will effect the North-Champs, they should be getting even fewer wait list slots now.

[Kevin Leonard]

I like the extra wildcards and 6 divisions/champs.
I'd love a little more wildcard reform (wildcards given out via district points structure), and districts/regional reform (let regional teams attend districts the same way district teams from other areas do), but we take every little victory.

[Jon Stratis]

I'll reserve judgement on the round-robin tournament structure for Einstein until I see it. There's potential for it to be boring, if two alliances clearly dominate after the first couple of matches... but there's also potential for it to be very exciting if the alliances are mostly evenly matched, or there's a question of alliances changing strategy depending on who they're facing. One thing's for sure - scouting other divisions is going to be somewhat important. Previously, you could scout the finals for the division you knew your division would be up against in the first round on Einstein, and then use the other Einstein matches to scout future opponents. Now, it's everyone!

Going to 6 divisions is probably good overall. If they did 4, there would be 100 teams per division, which would lead to fewer matches played and more complaints from everyone (who remembers the complaints the last time that happened?), and going to 8 would mean only 50 teams per division, which I don't think is deep enough for Champs.

For the wildcard spot... if a regional generates 4 wildcards, why not have a "3rd place" match? Make it a single match, winner take all. I've seen "3rd place" matches happen a lot at off-season events...

[Ernst]

Originally Posted by AllenGregoryIV

Seem like great changes to me, very happy with 6 subdivisions at each championship and a round robin Einstein.

Anyone want to do the math on how the extra wildcard will effect the North-Champs, they should be getting even fewer wait list slots now.

I probably screwed something up

but


20ish Regionals x 7 is 140 Regional slots

Using last season's numbers
Ontario - 137 teams
Michigan - 411
Indiana - 54
New England - 182
Mid Atlantic - 122
Chesapeake - 132

1038 total, or about 33% of all teams. Of the 800 total CMP spots they'll get about 265.

That brings us to 405.

So Halfchamps North has around -5 spots to split between original teams and the wait list. Hmmm.

[jajabinx124]

I too am not a fan of the 6 sub-divisions and the round robin format coming back to FRC.

I'm happy about the extra wildcard. Hopefully it should help a bit for under-represented regions at champs.

[RoboChair]

Originally Posted by ollien

Personally, I'm super excited to see this wild card change. As someone whose team has never been to champs, this gives me some hope for the future.

EDIT: I am curious though. If all 3 winning teams generate wild cards, who does the fourth wild card go to?

My major question in regards to the Wild Card changes is this. Does this mean that the rules will be changed to help prevent Wild Cards form being burned? I really hope this is the case, otherwise I could see this being even more of a loss at some events that already have several pre-qualified teams attending.

[jajabinx124]

Originally Posted by RoboChair

My major question in regards to the Wild Card changes is this. Does this mean that the rules will be changed to help prevent Wild Cards form being burned? I really hope this is the case, otherwise I could see this being even more of a loss at some events that already have several pre-qualified teams attending.

I hope that is the case as well. For the past 2-3 years for the 10,000 lakes regional and North Star regional in MN, their have been a crap ton of wildcards and with this new rule in effect, I see 1 or 2 wildcards being burned because of it. North Star in 2015 burned at least 1 wildcard because there were so many championship qualifying teams attending that regional. Just an example that wildcards get wasted at certain regionals even without the rule change.

[Doug Frisk]

Originally Posted by RoboChair

My major question in regards to the Wild Card changes is this. Does this mean that the rules will be changed to help prevent Wild Cards form being burned? I really hope this is the case, otherwise I could see this being even more of a loss at some events that already have several pre-qualified teams attending.

They said no other changes, so no. It does at least mean that the captain of the finalist alliance will be guaranteed an invite to Championships though.