Proposal for Wildcard Reform

[bdaroz]

Originally Posted by Kevin Leonard

At the 2016 Tech Valley Regional, the entire finalist alliance, including a backup robot made it to the championship event via the wildcard system.

I updated my wildcard spreadsheet to add info about "Burned" wildcards. These are Wildcards generated that could not be given out because the finalist alliance had already received a bid to CMP. (Either by earlier event, other award, or getting a WC)

Only 4 events generated burned WCs under the '16 rules, not surprisingly mostly later events. There were, however, two events that generated 4 wildcards, and at Lone Star two of those were burned.

All in all under the '16 rules, we used 57 WCs and burned 5.

Under the '17 rules (thus far) we would have used 88 wildcards and burned at least* 22.

(* - If a team would have gotten a WC under the 2017 rules in an earlier event that is not reflected in the burned total. Thus, this is a minimum number without going through and recalculating WC generation regional-by-regional for the 2017 rules. The spreadsheet calculates the 2017 WC generation as a simple +1.)

What's clear is that the 2016 rules did not have a material effect on the number of teams that "lost" out due to burned wildcards (92% of WCs used), but if we used the 2017 rules that would change with only about 80% of WCs being used.

Put another way, ~41% of the newly generated WC slots would be burned under the 2017 rules as they are.