Divisions at championships should not be made by choosing randomly which teams go to each division, Does any one the exact process by which divisions are made? I’m sure there is more to it since turing was stacked up of PNW teams and teams that competed at the oklahoma regional.
The reason to not do this randomly is to prevent powerhouse teams to be together (254 and 148 arguably 2 of the best robots competing this year) while upsets can still happen (2015 148 and 1114 being in the same division) by having 2 championships the amount of super competitive robots at one event is lower and having the 2 stronger ones (arguably) together makes the event less competitive. Almost no one was surprised that 148 and 254 won houston since everyone was expecting it to happen even before the event.
My suggestion would be a rank system based on your winning percentange through the season as well as the awards won and then doing a “random” acomodation as the one done for the soccer worldcup, sendind the strongest team to a random division and then going to the second one going to randomly to any other division an so on until all division have 1 team and so on with the rest. This way preventing a super division to be formed.
Frank posted in a blog a couple of years ago about the division assignment. Basically, divisions are filled in order of sign ups, e.g., the first team to sign up is assigned to Division A, second team to Division B, etc. There is a consideration for distributing rookie teams so that a division isn’t overweighted there, but no other performance considerations.
There are several other possibilities for making more coherent assignments.
I know we have better metrics than team number to gauge robot strength nowadays, but I don’t think we’re anywhere close to properly ranking “powerhouse” teams so as to “appropriately” divide them algorithmically. And doing it subjectively is just going to open things up to accusations of bias.
Would it have been different if it had been 118 instead of 148? How about 1619, 1678, 971, or 3310? Or what about 399 and 973 - oops, they were in the same division. My point is, there are enough really great teams that at least one of them is going to be in the same division as 254. (My apologies to other powerhouse teams I didn’t list.)
Even if by some amazing scheduling glitch, no other powerhouses were in their division, I’m not sure it would have really mattered. 254 was far and away the best robot in the world this year. The only team that could have beaten 254 was 254.
So assuming 254 is your “1” ranked team, does that mean that the 7 robot is also on their division? If so, let’s say the “2” through “7” robots are 148, 118, 1678, 2471, 3310, and 1323, in some order. Any of those robots is strong enough to be considered “unfair” when paired with 254. Are you suggesting that 254 not be allowed strong partners?
It’s already randomized pretty well. I like that your 2015 example doesn’t mention 254 though; the fact that they got stuck in quarterfinals was pure luck.
I meant that 99% as a meme, but it would be interesting to see what kind of alliance you’d need to form before they’d lose. For the record I’m not OP, and I certainly would never call for the end of randomized divisions
I agree with what others said. The way some events work, there is just a really dominant team attending (254) and with the help of another good team (1678, 1619, 3210, 1323, etc.), that team could easily win still. Ranking teams could be fairly difficult too. Is it based on OPR? Rank on previous events? Some people at First HQ judging each team ranking them 1-400? District points? In a district set up, this would be easy to do like how it works for Michigan, but otherwise, it’s harder said than done.
Knowing this now, and assuming it still to be the case, would it make more sense to weigh using the Michigan State Championship distribution, or some other performance-based metric run in the two pools of “even distribution of rookies and veterans across all divisons”?
New FIRST Rule Proposal: If you can’t make an alliance selection within 2 minutes, you must then pick your partner via blindfold and dart board (or spinning a wheel, darts might be considered a safety hazard).
There are only 6 divisions. There is simply no way to ensure that powerhouses get together. In my opinion there are way more than 6 powerhouses this year and no matter what you do some will end up together. You can either make more divisions(end up being overcomplicated) or try to divide all the teams into rank groups(elo levels, or so) and try to ensure that those groups are divided equally among those divisions.
This works now, but with more districts coming it’ll work less well each year. This helps to balance teams since many HOF teams register first (since they can) helping to distribute them evenly. Then, the teams that win regionals early (usually top teams) register in clusters as well.
With more districts coming, more top teams will be registering at the end of the seasons, destroying the coincidental balancing that seems to occur right now. I feel that there should be an even distribution of both rookies and HOF teams and then teams should be balanced by district ranking/match record for regional teams.
