paper: Stop the Stop Build

[FrankJ]

The teams that are playing 4 and five event are likely influenced by being mostly district teams progressing to worlds or well funded regional teams. In either case likely high performing teams. It seems that would skew the graphs.

[D.Allred]

Jim,
Thanks for the analysis and interim proposal. I submitted the following comment in the survey since it seemed to lean toward an all-or-nothing approach.

You left out the option of out-of-bag time between competitions. At a minimum, we need time to practice and do some maintenance. Modifications and upgrades could still be done at competitions.

My hope was to lessen tendencies for teams to join the arms race by not eliminating regional withholding rules. Stop-build-day or something like it is still a good schedule milestone. Extra time and the hard stop of competition day will not make people better time managers.

In my opinion, teams will see most performance gains through practice and small improvements. Performing well with your existing robot will hopefully help with team retention.

Now we need a decent place for teams to practice…

David

P.S. Just to be clear to the other readers, I voted for no bagging requirements. It may simply be too large of a culture shock for FIRST. However, the teams need some type of relief. What other “sport” does not allow practice between events? "Sport for the Mind?"