While looking at frclocks.com this morning (Monday of District Championship week) I was curious when I saw how many teams there were that got no points, or just got the team age bonus, within my district, New England. I don’t understand how you can actually compete and get no points within the district system so I looked at a random sampling of these no point teams across all districts and it appears that none of these teams actually show up to a single event. I’m curious if anyone knows if these teams actually have to pay a registration fee to show up in the system? Most of them clearly were active teams at some point prior to 2020, but don’t appear to currently be active. I was actually quite surprised by how large a percentage of teams they are in some districts.
Here are the numbers that I came up with per district, I tried to look for teams actually competing but I may not be 100% accurate.
I think FRCLocks.com is displaying more teams than actually exist. If you refer to any of the official district ranking lists (link: FRC Event Web : 2023 Season District List), you’ll see that each district has far fewer 0-point teams than FRCLocks.com shows, and each district contains fewer teams in general. For instance, MAR/FMA only contains 127 teams (vs. 151 as shown on FRCLocks.com), and no teams have 0 points.
I second this, Chesapeake has (iirc) only 112 teams which actually registered this season. While there were a few no shows, it was not nearly this many. However, it is still a problem that teams are not showing up to their events, and talking to others in Chesapeake we have lamented that there is no system or process by which teams are checked up on. It often seems that no one says anything until a team is already gone or its too late. It’s disappointing to see that people are missing out on FRC, and it is often difficult as students or other teams to reach out and help.
I was assuming the TBA lists were up to date which explains why there are some many dead team numbers in there.
I thought they were scrapping the data from the official FRC events and results pages which I why I thought these may have been no shows in some cases.
As a quick example, in FMA it shows 225 as no showing 2 events. 225 folded a few years ago. I usually bug the people at TBA to clean these teams out every year but forgot/didn’t get to it this year. Would be nice if an automated process could be set up to do this though.
For my own data gathering purposes via the blue alliance API, I filter teams out based on if they had any competitions registered.
For FIM 479 teams were scheduled for events. This ended up matching the official rankings on FRC page: FRC Event Web : 2023 FIRST In Michigan District (note two teams never played and two more only played once)
The official FRC API also had an issue this past fall including many teams that didn’t register for events this year. I’m not sure why this happened (I believe it wasn’t an issue for 2022), but it seems TBA is just using First’s data directly for the district participating teams API.
(Also, this is why the TBA district rankings page is different. It filters out teams that didn’t compete in the district)
They’re in off priority waitlist which they got on for being hall of Fame. The difference between priority waitlist and regular waitlist is the same for the purposes of how it affects points/advancement. I just gave them the Hof label to be nice
103 and 341 indeed seem to be what leads to the difference between both lists, but I am not familiar enough with the priority waitlist concept to be able to explain which list is correct.
Do you know where we can find clear and extensive explanations on how the priority waitlist works, and who is in it?
Because for some reason first can’t figure out their own system but I can sit at home and make a spaghetti code PHP script that does better than actual web developers.
I would like to thank the FMA folks for getting it right and announcing the correct teams at the event despite FIRST’s constant fumbles with this. Cannot express how disappointing and frustrating this is for teams near the cutoff year after year.
