Lessons Learned - The Negative

[AlexD744]

Originally Posted by martin417

After my second year of involvement with FIRST, I still have the same complaint. I understand that while COOPERTITION is way of FIRST (now trademarked and patented), this is, at its heart, a COMPETITION (otherwise, why keep score?). I understand that it's not about winning, but teams DO want to win the competition. Besides punishing teams for doing well (G14), there is the random, or "luck" factor. If a team works hard, and makes a great robot that meets the goals of the competition better than other teams, they should be rewarded. At every regional I attended, including championships, The seedings did not reflect the ability of the robots or the teams. If FIRST wants this to be a "sport", and be as popular as football, they need to come up with a better way to rank teams prior to alliance pairings. I have no problem with the serpentine draft and the no refusal rules, I see how that can prevent "super alliances", and make scouting important. I do have a problem with some of the best teams not even being in the top 8. Throughout the season, I saw teams that could not score at all ranked as the number one seed, while top scoring bots were not even in the top 10. Perhaps the seeding should be done based on the scoring of the bots rather than a win-loss record.

I don't have all the answers, but the questions remain. As many smart people as there are involved with FIRST, I am confident that they can come up with something better.

Thank you for saying this. This was what frustrated our team during this championship, I think we ended up ranking 54 because on our first day we were with some of the worst teams against dome of the best teams. Because we didn't have a name with any of these teams (except Bacon, and 179, who also got gyped by the rankings), we were not picked despite how well our individual robot performed. Maybe a system where the average of your scores determines, I don't know I haven't sat and thougt of how to rank teams, however, I do know that luck is way too prevalent in the current system. I might only feel this way because we got the short end of the stick on it, but other than that, I saw alliances such as 67, 111, and 45 in qualifiers. Most of 71's matches had another powerhouse against not that good teams. It just irks me that we had a robot at a high caliber and then lost because of random luck with alliance selections.

p.s. keep in mind that I am not being biased about my robot, our average scores for Friday, the day we didn't win a single match, was in the 80's (If you disclude the match were we got a DQ due to field issues). Sadly, the alliance pairing consistently gave us a pairing with teams that could barely make a score and against teams that could put scores above that number, it seemed unfair that this happened every match (except for Saturday after the teams had done their scouting).

On a different note: BRING DISTRICTS TO FLORIDA!!! It seemed to work great in Michigan, and that would increase the competition of the regional. SPeaking on a purely financial note however, paying for the initial districts, and the state competition might leave our team high and dry for Championships, but it would cost less than two regionals, which we have been thinking about.