What do you think

[BoyWithCape195]

Originally Posted by David66

It is not a flaw in FIRST. They use methods that are MUCh more fair than the NCAA, or other college organizations. They base everything on your overall record, as well as the strength of your opponents (hence being ranked by the number of points they score). The problem rather, is with scouting. When we get ready for an alliance selection we rank EVERY team that we might possibly want, starting with the number one seed. This way if this situation happens, or if we rise in the rankings, we know exactly who we want. THen, once we are on the field and our allianc captain has the bib on, we cross out picked teams/higher seeded teams, thatway NO ONE gets overlooked.

That is what every frirst team should do, but sadly, that is very complicated to get every team to do, and every team would not do this if some how you told every team

[Cory]

This happened to us, and I dont really have much sympathy, because when that happened, you needed to go out and make everyone aware of what happened, about your bot's capabilities, etc.

In 2002 at Nationals, we were seeded between 4th and 7th in the Einstein Division the entire competition. In our last qualifying match, we were up against team 16, which had an amazing ball collecting robot. at the time, we were ranked 7th. We ended up losing the match 48-52, and got knocked back to a tie for 11th, which Team 93 won, and we got dropped to 12th. Had we won that match, we would have been seeded 1st or 2nd. We thought we were going to be picked by a certain team, but due to some breakdown of communication or something, they picked team 10, which didnt exist. We almost moved up into the top 8, but ended up being one pick away.

We knew our robot was one of the best single goal robots in our division, and we knew for sure we were a lot better than many of the picked robots. There are 2 possible reasons we didnt get picked by someone else.

1) We didnt fit the alliance captain's strategy (We would have complemented at least one alliance, Im sure)

2)We failed to make ourselves known to the top 8 teams and the teams likely to move into the top 8.

The real culprit here was #2. We did nothing to make our name known to the other 7 teams in the top 8, since we figured the team we performed well with earlier, and had been planning to pick had we been in the top 8 would pick us, we didnt make any effort to show other teams what we could do.

At the end of the day, I had just as much fun anyways, and was happy we made it so far after having a non functional robot at SVR.

It isn't all about how you place in the competition guys. We placed dead last, with a record of 0-8-1 at Sacramento this weekend, and I had a blast!

Cory

[Alex Cormier]

Other: please explain:

not accusing you of doing somehting wrong or somehting like that.
last year we were in 52nd firday goign into sat. that friday night we made flyers and went to kinkos and got them cut and gave like 3 or 4 to each team to get our team out there... so once the picking came about the 6th seed or so picked us and we won. oh btw after sat. we were in 12th place..

i say... you should have went around to teams and handed out flyers about your team and team's bot during the time b4 picking alliances and tell them what place your team is in...

my 2.56958605895 cents

[BoyWithCape195]

Originally Posted by Pit Bull 1126

Other: please explain:

not accusing you of doing somehting wrong or somehting like that.
last year we were in 52nd firday goign into sat. that friday night we made flyers and went to kinkos and got them cut and gave like 3 or 4 to each team to get our team out there... so once the picking came about the 6th seed or so picked us and we won. oh btw after sat. we were in 12th place..

i say... you should have went around to teams and handed out flyers about your team and team's bot during the time b4 picking alliances and tell them what place your team is in...

my 2.56958605895 cents

This would have been a very good idea. We usually do this, but the match lost and the alliance pickings were a full 5 minutes apart at the most, so teams already had choosen and sent their representitives up on stage, so this would not have changed much. That why there should be a break in between the end of qualification matches and pickings and no showing of ranks (also we were going to be moved to first by winning that match but our partner didnt hang for the first time in the comp, and the only time. just our luck! We would have also gotten lots of qp 115 of it but..thanks to the other team we got screwed. What ever tough its over now Just trying to make everyone aware so it DOESNT happen to them)

[kid robusto]

Ben, i know it sucks, but please stop whinning about this. Although this really isnt fun, its life.

i hope that in the future they can make the system better, but if everything is perfect, we wont be prepared for it.

[BoyWithCape195]

Does any one have any ideas on how to FIX this problem that us and many teams have had in the past? Also, many teams will encounter this in the future if it is not fixed! So ideas are greatly appreciated

[KenWittlief]

Yes -Dean Kamen knows how to fix the problem:

from last years kickoff meeting: "at some point in the next six weeks you are going to start feeling like you are involved in a robot building contest. Then you are in serious trouble" -DK

the fix for the problem is to not take the competion so seriously - you got to test your robot against 30 to 60 other teams for 3 days and see how well your design worked - that is the purpose of the event - not to see who can build the best robot in your area

if the competition was meant to be a serious contest there would be serious prizes - like scholarships and large grants of money to every person on the winning team - and the contest would be one on one - no alliances - so the best robot would be the one that wins - and you would not see teams helping each other during the build season or in the pits, or encouraging schools to start new teams - because people would be focused on the prize and would not want more competition to beat to have to win it.

The fix is to not take the games so seriously - its intended to be fun - to be a learning experience about engineering and teamwork

the only way to fix the problem like you want to would be to turn FIRST into something else.

If you go home from a FIRST competition feeling like "we got screwd" then you dont "get it".