Entry Fee Increase---hurting teams

[Ian W.]

Originally Posted by Kevin Sevcik

Then again, you may have even more fun since you won't be worrying about fundraising and whether or not your team will lose sponsorship or if you'll be able to afford FIRST's latest price increase, etc. Or possibly just because BEST is also a challenging program. Don't knock it till you've tried it, and don't assume FIRST is necessarily better cause it's bigger, more expensive, and more complex. I'm quite certain you can have loads of fun in both BEST and FIRST simply because I know I have.

I'm sorry if that sounds rude or something, but I'm getting slightly annoyed at BEST being panned as FIRST's little brother, the horrible zone that FIRST teams are relegated to when they can't or won't pay to play in FIRST.

I say FIRST is more fun, mostly because from reading the BEST site, and trying to understand what it tries to achieve, FIRST has more in the way of electronics and controls, which is my area, what I consider fun. BEST seems, to me at least, to be about 3 or 4 years behind where FIRST is, control wise, but that's because they simply don't have the need for controls as advanced as we do. If I'm wrong, feel free to correct me, but that's the impression I got from reading BEST's own site.