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

[Ryan Foley]

I agree with Art on this one. Instead of limiting teams, offer more resources and off the shelf parts to teams so that those who lack funding and engineering staff can still build a competition worthy robot. The really spectacular robots built by powerhouse teams serve to get the students more excited for the next year, as they will hopefully want to build an even better robot. Events could be made more fair; a better and more accurate way to rank teams; more random match pairings, perhaps go to 12 elimination alliances instead of 8 so more teams can play, etc. Then yes, you could add robot classes, like MATE or Trinity Fire Fighting does. The unlimited class would be a good one to keep, then do a class that has the same robot construction rules as OCCRA (student built, very limited on parts). However, more classes means more work for the GDC, as there would have to be two versions of certain rulebook sections.

So as an alternative option, we could always try to expand BEST out of the south as well as OOCRA. Those competitions are limited in parts and mentor involvement, and we could keep FIRST as is. For really brave teams, you could compete in all 3, as they do not overlap.

Perhaps slightly off-topic, but I felt it is relevant:
As Dean has said many times, FIRST isnt fair; it shouldn't be. In real life, engineering companies and firms don't all have the same size bank accounts, or the same research capabilities. In order for FIRST to show kids what engineering is really like, they must give a somewhat accurate representation. If a kid wants to go into engineering knowing that some companies just arent at the same level as others, then he/she is truly interested in this stuff. But if we give the impression that everything is equal, that student may be very disappointed after getting their college degree. Besides, learning to deal with failure is an important part of life. So a team didnt make the elims, it has happened to everyone at one point or another. There was a little league near my hometown last summer that proposed that T-ball and little league should no longer include "outs" or "strikes". Kids have to learn to accept, deal with, and move beyond failure. I've been in that back row, watching everyone else get picked and win awards. As cliche as it sounds, you just have to try harder next year. Keep improving, and you will get your shot at those lovely medals. So if we do try to make FIRST more fair, don't make it "too fair"

[Donut]

Originally Posted by KenWittlief

the four divisions at the Championship crossed my mind on the drive home tonight. If we did have different classes or levels of regional awards, there could be 4 divisions of competition at the championship: rookie / expert / unlimited / student built...

This 4 division talk got me thinking of a possible way to give teams that don't do as well at the competition to get in the playoffs (besides the alliance selection thing).

The answer could be regions. Have each regional split up into regions (there would be regions for half the amount of alliances, so at the standard 8 alliance regional there would be 4 regions, at a super-regional with 12 alliances there would be 6 regions, etc.). These regions would be split as evenly as possible (7 teams per region at an event with 28 teams, regions not divisible by 4 may have a few regions with 1 team more or less than the others).

Most competitions have 8-12 matches played per team in qualifiers. Of these, some would become "region games", in which all of your opponents and partners are made up of teams only from your region. Every team in the region would need to play the same number of region games if possible; ideally a team would also play against and with every team in their region at least once, but the odds of that working out are low I think.

Then, when it comes time to declare alliance captains, each Region Winner (the team with the best REGION record, and if that is tied some kind of tiebreaker will need to be invented) will be guaranteed a spot as an alliance captain. This means half the alliance captains will be Region Winners, while the other half are still open to the teams who placed well but just didn't win their region (wildcard spots, bascially).

Since Region Winners are based off of your region record, a team that goes 3-8 in the competition overall but 3-0 in their region can become an alliance captain (for winning their region).

Now of course the odds are that a team not doing so well will have to face at least one powerhouse team in their region, but if they get the right alliance partners or have a lucky match they can beat them and win the region with that, rather than having to get lucky in numerous matches to place high enough to be an alliance captain with the current system.

Now if you found a way of classifying different teams you could try to create regions of all rookies, all teams without mentors, etc. Some teams might get left out if there aren't enough rookies to make a full region, or there's too many, or something like that, but it will give some a better shot.

Regions could also be used in Championship divisions as well.

[Dan Petrovic]

I don't think there is a good way to make FIRST fair.

A team is how the members want to make it. If the team has the enthusiasm and work ethic to be successful, then they will. If a team really doesn't want to do much, just sort of slack off and wait for build season to argue about everything, then that team wont be successful.

FIRST can't do much to make the playing field level. It comes from the team members. It starts with teamwork. If you don't have a team that works well together, then nothing will be accomplished. This can be solved by getting together as a team and doing... something! It doesn't matter, just get out and do something together. A lot of time is wasted when arguements came up. That happened to us this year. There was an arguement about whether we should shoot or score in the side goals, then another arguement about the shooter design.

Arguements lead to wasted time, frustration, and poor products of one's work because of that frustration.

Communication is another big one. Communcation isn't entirely being able to talk. There's more to that. Communication is rendered to just someone babbling if no one is listening. Team members need to know how to listen to eachother. If the controls and mechanical aren't on the same page about what's going on, 6 weeks into it, everyone will be cursing at everything.

FIRST can do everything in it's power to make the game as fair as possible, but it's useless if a team can't get along.

The only true way to make it fair is for the powers that be in FIRST hold our hands through it all, and that's no fun.

Okay, I'm hungry. Bye.

-Dan!