PNW District Ranking System Website

[Thad House]

So it looks like there is a bug in the calculation where its not doing awards correctly. Maybe I'm wrong, but I calculated our points to be 83, and it only shows 73. Maybe its missing awards, because 73 is what comes out before calculating awards.

[Navid Shafa]

Originally Posted by Thad House

So it looks like there is a bug in the calculation where its not doing awards correctly. Maybe I'm wrong, but I calculated our points to be 83, and it only shows 73. Maybe its missing awards, because 73 is what comes out before calculating awards.

Awards are currently showing as 0 points for you here.

[Thad House]

Originally Posted by Navid Shafa

Awards are currently showing as 0 points for you here.

Oh ok. I didn't know you could look up individual teams and see exactly what their points are coming from. It doesn't look like any teams from Oregon City have award points.

[Navid Shafa]

Originally Posted by Thad House

Oh ok. I didn't know you could look up individual teams and see exactly what their points are coming from. It doesn't look like any teams from Oregon City have award points.

The Oregon City Award page is currently missing. Should update after that.

[Jeffrafa]

Very cool that you can see individual team results, I didn't realize that was a feature until now. Nice graphical interface for viewing results.

It appears that the Oregon City awards did not get uploaded/posted on the FIRST website. They should be viewable here, but instead I am getting a 404 error. Until this is resolved I suspect the leaderboard will not account for the award points from Oregon City.

[alectronic]

I just put in the results for Oregon awards and they should now be accounted for. There was an issue with the upload at the event, so I had to wait until I received them in an email.

[bobcroucher]

Thanks for the awesome website skunks. It takes all the work out of the district model. We quickly know right were we all stand, very convenient! See you in Portland (I hope).

[Navid Shafa]

Originally Posted by bobcroucher

Thanks for the awesome website skunks. It takes all the work out of the district model. We quickly know right were we all stand, very convenient! See you in Portland (I hope).

Paul and Alex did all the coding, they deserve the thanks. I'll see you in Portland either way

[Joe Ross]

Where does the alliance selection order come from?

[alectronic]

I get it from the FTA's at each event. (As you probably know, there is no public posting of rank order by FMS)

[Bob Steele]

There was some discussion on teams opting out of doing a third district event.
I know that our team considered this before the season and made a conscious decision to try and get students and mentors to events as volunteers (primarily video crew) rather than try and get the whole team to another event.

This is the first year of districts and we felt that support of the entire system was more important than getting another "practice" in.

A secondary consideration was the possibility of taking away points from other teams that were competing in one of their districts that "counted" for them.

I think we need to take a look at that. If our team competed in a third event and we were lucky enough to do well or to win an award, the points we scored that don't count for us are points that a team participating for the 2nd event would not be able to get.

Yes it would be a benefit to get another practice in but at the expense of allowing other teams to get points for District qualifications.

It think this issue needs to be addressed next year. I, for one, would choose to remove 3rd play teams from the elimination rounds and also not allow them to win awards at their 3rd play. I know this seems radical but I think it is the only fair way for teams to advance to district championships.

I am in NO WAY berating teams that have chosen to do a third play this year under the rules we are playing. I am only suggesting that we need to think this through next year.

For many teams that do not have a history of success, they will see the stronger teams coming in to play for a third time as taking away their chance to score points. If we are doing it for practice... then just do it for practice...

Good luck on the fields!!

[AustinH]

A partial fix may be to exclude 3rd play teams from winning judged awards, or alternatively finding a way to eliminate the "optional" element by having 3 events per registration and have all the points count.

I make no claims as to how easy logistically or financially the second idea would be.

[Jeffrafa]

Originally Posted by Bob Steele

A secondary consideration was the possibility of taking away points from other teams that were competing in one of their districts that "counted" for them.

I think we need to take a look at that. If our team competed in a third event and we were lucky enough to do well or to win an award, the points we scored that don't count for us are points that a team participating for the 2nd event would not be able to get.

Yes it would be a benefit to get another practice in but at the expense of allowing other teams to get points for District qualifications.

It think this issue needs to be addressed next year. I, for one, would choose to remove 3rd play teams from the elimination rounds and also not allow them to win awards at their 3rd play. I know this seems radical but I think it is the only fair way for teams to advance to district championships.

It is important to understand the reasoning for 3rd plays in the district model. Michigan has been developing and using the district model for over 5 years, and none of the decisions about how the district system works have been made without significant discussion and statistical analysis on impacts to how points are distributed. There is room for discussion and adjustments in the future - but we ought to start out with a common understanding of why things are the way they are.

First - 3rd plays are not for the sole benefit of teams that decide to take them at the cost of teams who happen to attend the same event, they exist for two reasons:

1. To increase participation, rather than let vacant spots go to waste.
2. To make district events fair by making sure all events have the same number of teams in attendance.

The fairness of 3rd plays has been brought up and discussed throughout the development of the district model, when it began as FiM. Jim Zondag was heavily involved in the development, and addressed many common questions last year in an FAQ, including this one - it is well worth a read. I'll include Q10 for easy reference:

Q10: “Why do you allow some teams to play a third district, isn’t this an unfair advantage?”
A10: One of our primary goals is to increase FRC team participation wherever possible. In pursuit of
this goal, we feel that offering vacant slots to teams who want them serves the goals of FIRST and FiM
better than leaving them empty. While this does give additional playing time to some teams, all teams
who wish to play at an additional event are free to enroll in the annual lottery for these available slots.
All teams have equal opportunity for these lottery slots.
Also, if we left these spots empty, we would be giving additional advantage to any team attending a
partially unfilled event. Mathematically, the system is fairer overall if the events are all fully attended.
We want all events to have the same statistical significance in our system.
We add events in units of 40 slots. Growth forces us to add events each time we add 20 new teams.
Usually the number of teams/40 leaves a remainder of 15-20 spots open. We prefer to fill these for
event balancing.

Third play is also not intended to constitute a significant portion of available spots - if the right number of events are available for the teams in the district, only a few spots should remain (1-2 dozen, ideally - roughly 5%), instead of the ~16% remaining in PNW after second registration. And teams participating in 3rd play, although earning points that don't get counted, aren't there simply to 'steal' points away from other teams at that event - they are there to make sure those teams have the same opportunity at the points as if they attended any other district event.

Any district that is smaller gives all teams attending a clear unfair advantage over teams attending larger districts. Already the PNW district has strayed from the intended use by having unequal event sizes (I am not looking to place blame, just stating a fact). I do not envy the job of having to determine where and how many events to host, how many teams to have attend each, and how to make sure all events fill evenly. It is far from an easy task, especially in the first year of implementation. They were planning for growth going into 2014, but instead the team count shrunk (in both states). They adjusted by decreasing district sizes from 40 to 36, but this still didn't end up being sufficient - as 56 spots were left after second district registration. Really, we should have had 9 districts instead of 10, so only 20 3rd play spots would have remained (or 8 districts @ 40 teams each, leaving 14 3rd plays), but who would have forecasted that a year ago when planning started. Then 3rd plays were opened to top off events, but the 18 that went for it fell far short of the 56 required to fill up all the events.

Let's take a quick look for a case study: Mt Vernon had 28 teams, that means all but 4 automatically earned some number of alliance selection points (That's 86%, compared to 69% at Oregon City or Auburn, or 60% at a Michigan district), in addition to getting an almost de-facto chance at additional points by playing in finals. On top of that they had a better chance at winning an award since fewer teams were in attendance. This would have been even more severe if 3rd plays weren't allowed, as the disparity between the smallest and largest event would have been even greater. 3rd plays aren't there to steal points, they are there to make sure no team has an unfair advantage at points by attending a smaller event.

Also we need to keep the big picture in mind. We are not an island, and long term it is important that things are equal and fair not just within our district but between districts. Inter-District play will become a reality sooner rather than later, that's why they have already standardized the district point structure - we can't just go making our own changes to the system. By the time Inter-district hits, it will be important that our event size is the same as FiM or MAR, so that our district doesn't offer an unfair advantage.

[alectronic]

I know the chat in this thread changed slightly, but I wanted to point back to the website itself. Tonight we pushed version 1.2 live, and it has some great new features. We invite you to provide you feedback through the email listed on the website, PM here on CD, or just post it in the thread. We are bring new features as quickly as we can, and your feedback goes a long way in prioritizing our work.

In Version 1.1.x we introduced:

• Match Data updates "live" during events
• New layout for detail pages - highlights matches based on the team being viewed
• Fixed a bug related to match display order if replay matches happened at an event
• Administrative page changes
• Added profile bar available to logged-in users

In Version 1.2 we are introducing:

• Improved Caching for faster page loading
• Fixed a bug that was causing the alliance selection points to be correct, but text version to be backwards for round 2
• Improved the tie breaker algorithm for teams with equal district ranking points
• Clarified text on scoring, about us and contact pages
• Tie breaker values are shown on each team's detail page
• Team names and numbers are clickable each time they appear and lead to the team detail page
• On the district ranking page, you can hover over the calendar icon next to a score to see which event it was from. Or, click for the full details from that event

We hope you will enjoy these changes for week 4. For those attending competitions, good luck!

[Navid Shafa]

Originally Posted by alectronic

We hope you will enjoy these changes for week 4.

Wow, thanks again Alex!

Any chance we can get the qualification break down posted? A lot of people at the events have been asking the big question: "Who makes it to District Champs and World Champs?"

It's very likely that I'm off, but this is my current understanding that I've been sharing:

64 teams would qualify for the PNW District Championship. 10 district Chairman winners, 54 taken from the point system ranking.

Points accrued at the District Championship are worth (3x) as much.
PNW would then send the following (24) teams to the World Championship:
-3 Chairman’s Winners
-1 Engineering Inspiration
-1 Rookie All Star
-19 Teams based off of the District Point Ranking.