If First doesn’t remain stagnant at the current # of total teams and grows as they want to, there is going to come a point where things have to change. Being in a district model (MAR), I believe the first step is going to the district model entirely. This as has been discussed in other threads is a major task. Then a district championship event can take on more of a worlds experience. This would allow more teams to share the experience as First grows.
Cory has a good point and can get his way* with just three mere words: I.R.I.
- No automatic HOF invitations
- No Original and Sustaining Invitations
- No invitations back just because a team did well last year
Make it an official FIRST event with no CA/EI/RAS (it practically is already…). Problem solved. IRI is so fun to watch, I bet we could even get ESPN, PBS, HBO, or some other network to broadcast it. And no snarking on PBS…
*Cory doesn’t strike me as a guy who likes Unicorns or Rainbows, so I’m guessing he’d rather that Champs be purely a merit-based event…
This has been a really interesting thread to follow, with some good points.
Our team has a guideline: “if our robot does not make eliminations at a regional, we don’t go to championships.” Does not matter what award we win that gets our ticket, we won’t go. We never have enacted it but it does put pressure on us to make a good robot. However, you might want to ask me again if we do qualify with a robot that did not make eliminations. This is an untested guideline.
I am interested to know how your team came up with this guideline because its actually pretty intriguing.
Just to clarify a bit on the behalf of 4451 (and to further your point), at Orlando they were the first pick by the #2 alliance (us). They did not lose based on their performance, they lost based on our performance. We picked them to score 54 points in each match and they did so in all nine elimination matches we played. If we hit our autonomous in finals 2 (or made the one shot we bounced off the bar), they would have qualified based on being a regional champion. Based on this, I don’t think it’s necessarily fair to lump them into the category of “rookie along for the ride at championships”. I’m sure there are others that have similarly high performance.
Personally, I don’t think this would be good. I think the RAS/EI/CA teams would feel very left out. It also assumes that those teams do not have good robots. We won RCA in 2010, but were also in the quarterfinals at regionals, and an alliance captain on Curie that year (with, literally, a box on wheels mind you!)
I dig this idea, if you want competitive matches, IRI will deliver.
If we’re going to say that the Chairman’s Award is the most prestigious and important award in FRC. And that the CA recognizes a model team that others should look up to and learn from, then I don’t see how we could possibly suggest not giving CA winners a spot at CMP.
If we want less teams at CMP, the waitlist is the first thing that has to go. I don’t know why anybody would suggest cutting teams that do amazing things, work hard, and actually qualify for CMP over teams that are, essentially, buying their way in.
I totally agree that 100 teams was too many, and 8 matches sucked. But honestly, the “elite” teams with fantastic robots still rose to the top. Yeah, maybe the rankings were skewed and who exactly was alliance captain was thrown off a little from what it would have been. But the finals were full of those elite teams.
Yeah, we were one of those robots this year, we went to CMP for RCA.
So I’m sorry that our robot might have brought yours down a little, but hey, the winning alliance from Curie was still all “elite” teams anyway, what difference did it really make?
Sorry if I come off as defensive or angry, it’s because I’m defensive, and a little angry.
This is still an open-minded civil discussion, nobody is saying anyone has the wrong opinion. 
The difference between 400 teams 8 matches and 360 teams 9 matches is not just each team get one match difference. That does not seem like a lot. However the whole purpose of qualifying round is to bubble up the deserving teams to be alliance captains.
I am neutral on the topic on which teams should be invited to the championship. To me that is not as important. I see both sides of the argument and both are valid. What is important in my viewpoint is to bubble up the deserving teams to be alliance captains so they can pick good robots as their partners and have an awesome and competitive elimination round to make it exciting.
Having 400 teams and 8 matches will not allow only derseving teams to be alliance captains. A weak alliance captain who gets there due to luck of schedule will not be able to put together a competitive alliance and the elimination match will be one sided. 360 teams with 9 matches is still not ideal but is a lot better.
To people who says it is not about the robot and championship is a showcase, celebration or science fair, I have this to say. I have no problem with teams with varying capability at the championship. However qualifying round means just that. The best teams should qualify for elimination round. They should be alliance captains. Hence the number of teams and matches per team must allow this to happen. Otherwise, why have qualifying and elimination rounds. We can just all show up and play some friendly matches to showcase and celebrate. And to take it to the extreme, why even bother to keep score!
This brings up an important point about the inspiration of competition. Yes, Worlds can be inspiring to all teams in and of itself. “Lower level” (however you’d like to define it) teams can learn a lot and be motivated to work harder and try more simply by attending.
But what about the teams that are already that inspired and worked their tails off to make the best robot they’ve ever made? Organizing a qualifying round that can’t give them a fair shot can–and has, I heard to examples just this year–led to students on the verge of the “next level” becoming demotivated and uninspired. If you put all that work in and get hurt by the number of quals and your allies’ caliber, is it any surprise that some students lose faith? Is more always better*, or is it such a stretch to see the uninspiring downsides?
*Note that I’m not saying 400 is necessarily too many or 8 is necessarily too few. (I happen to believe that’s so, but I’m more concerned about the concept than the threshold.)
Relatively little. Enough to know that I don’t particularly like it. It’s hard to be enthusiastic about a game which the principal challenge is in out-computing the opponent.
I know enough people who are clearly better than I am at that kind of computation, and doubt my own ability and motivation to hone my skills to that level; competing against them is no fun, and the outcome is basically a foregone conclusion. By contrast, competing against fellow novices is a less banal undertaking, specifically because we don’t know what we’re doing and/or can’t be bothered to try to play efficiently—and that kind of outlook virtually guarantees we’ll never be any good at it, even if we have somewhat more fun.
As I hinted at before, for those who enjoy programming, it’s more fulfilling to focus on something that people are good at—conceiving and implementing efficient algorithms and effective heuristics—while offloading the computational chores to a computer. Chess makes a better computer science problem than it does a game.
I’m not asserting that these are mutually exclusive skills. Poker is nice because, in addition to valuing computational ability (expected values of hands given the situation), it traditionally emphasizes the ability to interpret your opponents’ behaviour and incorporates a high degree of uncertainty in individual hands (which can be won or lost independently of your ability to master the game). It’s that uncertainty that allows a novice to have fun playing against an expert, because there’s a plausible chance that they’ll win any given hand, even when the odds are against them.
Quite the contrary, they tend to go hand-in-hand. I can tell you from personal experience that poker is pervasive through a large portion of the chess community; I doubt this is purely coincidence.
Poker is nice because, in addition to valuing computational ability (expected values of hands given the situation), it traditionally emphasizes the ability to interpret your opponents’ behaviour and incorporates a high degree of uncertainty in individual hands (which can be won or lost independently of your ability to master the game).
Interestingly, winning poker players complain about variance, probably more than anything else. Probably falsely so; it’s the variance that keeps the fish playing and allows them to make money, but it is simultaneously the single most frustrating part of the game. It no longer contributes to “fun” once you reach a certain skill level - at best, it’s a necessary evil.
It’s that uncertainty that allows a novice to have fun playing against an expert, because there’s a plausible chance that they’ll win any given hand, even when the odds are against them.
This is certainly true, and is the likely the sole reason poker is such a profitable game.
I could discuss this at length, but I fear this is going off-topic. At any rate, I do not think the introduction of randomness into FRC championships is the proper motivation for allowing teams with less-than-impressive robots to attend nationals; at most, it’s a secondary effect. What is important is the experience afforded to those teams, the and the very real beneficial effects they see as a result of it. This must be weighed against the logistics of the competition itself, and the result is, as others have mentioned, essentially an optimization problem. I am of the opinion that the balance ought to be in favor of including more teams rather than optimal competitiveness; this seems to best match both my experience at championships and my conception of what the entire purpose of FIRST is.
This is my 5th FRC competitive season and I mentor with two teams at two different maturity levels (3015-marked improvement each year & 340-amazing program…team that is destined for the FIRST hall of fame).
Last year I got to check off a bucket list item when I got to go to the world championships in St. Louis for the 1st time (both teams qualified). Even though both teams did well in qualification matches, neither got picked for elimination matches. It was a truly inspiring event and I returned to Rochester with more passion than ever to help both teams.
This year both came close, but neither qualified for St. Louis and I am sure both will learn from season mistakes and come back stronger next year.
Some years a great team doesn’t make it to championship and sometimes a team that was on the right alliance at the right regional gets an experience of a lifetime. Minimally I think there should always be a path so that each FRC team that is willing to make the trip can experience the Championship event every 4 years minimum, even if they just drive a box with 4 wheels on it.
Athough it is predictable that rookie teams lack the experience to make them as competitive as veteran teams, it is so much fun to watch/encourage them try.
It’s more than possible I’m misunderstanding, but from what I see a HUGE part of FRC elimination rounds is knowing your opponent’s next move and working a strategy based off of that. Especially at the championships and Einstein, where the difference isn’t between individual robot abilities, but between how the match is played and what strategic edge you can get over your opponent. Obviously the principle challenge is designing a robot to play the game itself, but calculating the actions of the opposing alliance to create a plan of action is definitely a key aspect to FRC.
Since we started our team 6 years ago in 2008, we have qualified for worlds 7 times, only 2 of which have been on the field itself. If RAS, EI, or RCA did not get us tickets to worlds, we would have only gone twice, and only a small percentage of members/alumni/mentors would have had the experience of competing at the world level and meeting all the other teams, which I can guarantee has changed lives.
Personally, I like how diverse worlds is. And if the mission of FIRST is to spread the message of STEM education and get kids excited about it, why shouldn’t we invite the teams that do exactly that to the championships? The Chairman’s Award is supposed to be the most prestigious award presented at the competition, even if their robot is substandard. Why, then, should we keep these teams from participating at worlds, if they truly are “the model for other teams to emulate?” And it truly is my opinion that if you truly are a Chairmans or EI or RAS team, you probably have a pretty strong program, thus a pretty strong bot. I’m not saying that theirs are always the best, but they usually have some very good bots. I can tell you that if it wasn’t for all the stuff that we do in our community that has resulted in our EIs, RCA, and RAS, then we would not have nearly as strong of a bot as we do now.
Personally, I think we can scrap the waitlist. With the new Wildcard system in play, I don’t really think we need the RAS award to be a ticket to STL, to be honest, it kind of defeats the purpose of the rookie year. If a rookie does perform exemplary, in my mind they would’ve made it to the finals in their regional and either won or gotten a wildcard. However, FIRST - For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology. I don’t think there’s any point at all in just going to STL to present something, while you watch in envy of being on the world’s fields from 20 feet away.
tl;dr - Scrap the waitlist and RAS, keep Wildcards, EI, and RCA.
What do you intend for regionals that don’t have wildcards? For example, Smoky Mountains had 0 wildcards this year. I’m sure it wasn’t the only one. What about teams that participate in only week 1 or week 2 events? There are next to no wildcards there, if any. And just saying that “if they really are that good, they will make it to the finals” is completely and entirely not true. Our rookie year, we had a good bot, but were picked by the #7 alliance as a 3rd pick at a very small event. Even veteran teams have this issue. Just because they don’t make it to the finals does not mean that they are not good and do not have a good program. What you just said is that if you have a good program, you WILL make it to the finals (top 6). Again, even for veteran teams this isn’t always the case. RAS really has little to nothing to do with the robot itself, but mostly do do with the team attribute aspects of their program. So you’re saying that a rookie team that has an extraordinary program WILL make it to the finals?
If we had not attended worlds our rookie year, we would not have had nearly the amount of inspiration for the next year from our community, participants, and non-existant sponsors. Granted, we also won the regional, but let’s say that we didn’t. After we attended worlds, people suddenly got interested. Our rookie members (which was all of us) would not have had the inspirational and life-changing experience of worlds. We got rewarded not for our robot, but for the type of program that we ran. And the fact that it was an award that was important enough to qualify us for worlds inspired us and showed us that we can in fact win EI and RCA in the future, which we have. That whole foundation was laid by attending championships.
Anybody that says that RAS shouldn’t be a qualifier for worlds has never been on a team when they won RAS.
It’s still an untested guideline, should we qualify for championships without making it to eliminations at a regional, we would discuss the situation before making decisions.
The guideline came about last year when were blessed to be the second to last pick at Madera. We were on a alliance with 254 and 1323, and were finalists. 766 at SVR was the last pick and was on an alliance with 254 and 971. that alliance won and 766 went to champs.
As 766 was getting ready to choose, I talked with some members, a few considered it financially risky to go. Verdict was to go. The students had a lot of fun, came back with a lot memories and ideas.
On 3309’s end, we discussed how had if we had won madera, would we have gone? At this point we only at about $15k budget for that year and worked out of a classroom. we would have to raise more money, but that money could be used to invest in tooling. Since we did not go, we banked our money and used it for other expenses.
We felt that if you were a 3rd member of an alliance last year, the line could be blurry to go or not to go. this year is different, I am glad so many robots are playing better this year. We felt using your selection # was a poor metric for deciding to go to championships. There was too much debate and like 766, the discussions favored going to champs.
After that, I brought up that we should not go to champs if we did not make eliminations. Mostly this was agreed upon because not making eliminations meant we did not perform to our minimum standards, warranting a critical review. In short, we are competitive, not making eliminations would be a major problem. In 3309’s history, we did not make eliminations our 1st two years and we haven’t missed one since. In conclusion, the guideline formed around our minimum standard.
I guess we are a little pragmatic. Certainly our philosophies drive this guideline too. Did that answer your question? This a complicated topic because it deals with inspiration, I have not even touch our discussion points. I might have to explain more.
I think that right there is exactly the point of bringing RAS teams. To watch the very best in the world - hopefully not with envy but with the feeling of “we can do that some day”.
This is obviously only a measure of the competitive merit of teams based on how they qualify for the CMP (and not even a particularly good one). Though I wasn’t on Team 2337 when they attended the CMP as a rookie all-star in 2008, I heard glowing tales of an awesome competition as an underclassman. Even the second-hand inspiration of an RAS can have a lasting effect.
Method of Qual Rank in Division
Last Year's Einstein Teams 26.3
Hall of Fame 29.33333333
By Rank from District CMP 30.57692308
Original and Sustaining 33.28571429
Winning Captain 33.4
Winning 1st Pick 38.02325581
Wildcard Captain 39.14285714
Wildcard 1st Pick 46.83333333
Engineering Inspiration 52.48333333
Chairman's Award 52.95238095
Off the Waitlist 53.8
Winning 2nd Pick 62.66666667
Rookie All-Stars 62.81132075
Wildcard 2nd Pick 67.83333333
Of the 6 Wildcard 2nd Picks, only 1 seeded in the top half of their division, versus 15/54 of Winning 2nd Picks and 15/53 Rookie All-Stars. The former is a really small sample size, however.
Attached spreadsheet shows the data if anyone wants to take a look.
Method of Qualification.xlsx (822 KB)
Method of Qualification.xlsx (822 KB)
I find it very surprising that Hall of Fame teams, with their free pass to attend, out qualified the regional winning captains and first picks.
What is the alliance mem line?