Ideas to move in the direction of making FIRST competitions 'fair'

[KenWittlief]

Originally Posted by Bongle

I just finished re-doing my last year->this year stats with all the standings available rather than just GTR. ....

I think your data proves the point that FIRST is not a fair competition. Since each team only contributes 33% of the makeup of each alliance, how can any team expect to have consistant match results, when they are matched with and against the best to the lowest performers?

When your team represents only 16% of the action on the playfield, I would not expect there to be any correlation between your teams performance, and the outcome of the matches (win/lose), unless you have been able to build a robot that totally dominates the playfield - unless you have a 6 to 1 advantage over the other teams. That is a totally unfair competition.

An excellent team may do great one year, and poorly the next year.

A poor team may do well two years in a row...

This is what we have been talking about, the competitions are not fair - the outcome can be completely random no matter how hard your team works.

What do you learn from that? Work hard and the outcome is still random?

Work twice as hard next year and you may end up doing even worse?

In the real world companies do form alliances and partnerships, but we get to carefully choose those alliances, and we get to reject a partner if they fail to perform. We are not paired with alliance parters at random!

This is not the only aspect of FIRST that is not fair, it is only one.