Hello,
I’ve seen some debate on here on the topic of “FRC being pay to win” so I felt like this was a good place to post this:
I’m carrying out research to find if there’s a correlation between FRC team budget and ranking. Participation is highly appreciated–filling out this survey would be extremely helpful. Would love to hear your input! 
https://forms.gle/9fKoZHXWNRa9UXTCA
You could give me the world’s best, most fanciest machine shop and I would still not know how to use a CNC.
And in the words of someone at some point in time:
“money doesn’t buy happiness success but it sure makes the pursuit of it easier”
Edit to add: Just like real life, there is a minimum amount needed to thrive but past some point there are diminishing returns.
I think mentor support is the biggest thing in performing well, more important than budget. Budget certainly helps, though.
Having only head mentors able to fill out this survey might get you fewer responses than you could get if you allowed everyone to.
Specifically, mentor retention imo.
Build a steady culture, design approach, protocols, etc. Once you have that structure down, you can really dial in the rest of your process and robots will only improve along they way.
Agree, good mentor support has a higher correlation to winning than money.
We ran 225 in 2013 by floating $1.5k-$2k for parts on 3 mentors’ credit cards, getting the $5k initial registration from BAE Systems, everyone paying travel out-of-pocket, and FMA champs/world champs registrations being covered by FMA team hardship grants. We did well enough that we got some extra money to support the offseason/future seasons, and the robot won 4 competitions overall that year.
You don’t need a lot of money to do well if you play your cards right – though I think you need a couple thousand more than you used to in seed money for several critical COTS components these days.
I don’t think it’s pay to win, but I do think there’s a certain degree to which you need to pay to have a shot at winning. Even if a top team had all of it’s mentors it would have a difficult time remaining at a high level if it were heavily restricted on budget. However, I would say you can probably only pay your way up to being somewhere in the middle of the rankings at a regional/district and anything above that is going to be based much more strongly on factors beyond budget.
Edit: Oops. Didn’t mean to reply to Eliot
My 2 cents: don’t build off of a contentious sentiment on a public forum if you want useful data.
“Pay to Win” is an ugly phrase.
I know of a lot of teams with budgets orders of magnitude larger than my own who haven’t “won” a regional in years.
Consider other phrases that encourage people to think about the level and variety of financial “investments” the team has that help them be “successful”.
Figuring out there’s a correlation between budget and ranking is easy. Figuring out which way the causation flows is harder. Teams that are good for reasons besides money raise more money; if I had to bet, that causal direction is more significant than the other.
Also, comparing budgets apples to apples is difficult, because, for example, some teams may have to pay for teacher/mentor salaries, workspace, or travel where others do not.
But then I can’t be quippy on the internet! How will I get my internet points?
Really, it would be hard to collect and analyze this data - such a small amount of teams are on CD, a small amount will fill out the form, and a really small percentage have reliable markers of “success”. @Nate_Laverdure (among others) has been talking about doing a FRC990 to collect similar data (although probably for different reasons).
I don’t think anyone can deny that teams with better access to resources, both money and mentors (both of which are driven mainly by where the school is located), do not do better than average than the other less well off schools.
That being said, personally, I’ve found that FRC is not about making it to world’s every single season. I’m happy if the students build something that does cool stuff, and comes from their own knowledge and hard work. Do the best you can and have fun with it.
Money can’t buy you engineering experience, so no.
That being said, money goes a long way (if you know what to do with it).
Realistically yes this competition requires a great deal of funding to compete at the very highest levels.
I read through the questions. This is not research. This is farming for opinions that support the OP’s position. Questions are designed to elicit supportive answers, and ask how people feel or think. It really doesn’t matter what people think, what matters are the facts - gathering data on actual team budgets, fluctuations in budgets over the years, number and experience of mentors, team size, experience level of the team, and other factors that could influence success might, and I stress might, allow someone to develop correlations between success and the factors that provide it. But you have to design your questions to cover a much broader scope, and to be unbiased.
Setting aside all of the problems with polling CD. The way the original post phrased the Question “FRC pay to win” has a bias to it. It sounds like there is something you would like to be true ( thus my troll concerns).
Survey and question design is an art and science in itself. Impartial questions or careful design around agreeableness with a series of questions take a surprising amount of work.
This is the energy drink guy all over again
How terrible would it be to disallow posts from newly created accounts unless they have a team number set? It could expire after a few days even and still successfully filter out trolls
Pretty easy to set a team number, but it is still a small hurdle, most trolling is pretty low effort. A 24 hr on new threads (trust level) is a pretty common thing on other forums. A small delay (even just an hr) may encourage people to actually search for their problem too instead of treating CD like discord and making a new thread.
That being said I will happily deal with a few trolls and call them about if it looks suspicious if it means a new freshman programmer with no extra support can put a working bot on the field. Trolls should not be a barrier to entry for actual folks that need help. Just my 2¢
I am going to approach this with an open mind and the assumption this isn’t a troll post.
When I clicked on the survey I was surprised to see Florida being a focus. I will fill out the survey a little later when I can access our budget from 2018.
Since 2018 Orlando and South Florida are a focus I can give you some insight.
179 finished Rank 2 and 1 at the two events, captained said alliances and won both events. So regardless of measurement will be the most successful Florida team/team at the events.
179 is not in the top 10 of Florida teams in terms of budget, just based on the teams I know a rough estimate on their yearly budgets. If you factor in the 8 international teams and the 7 out of state teams who attended the events I would not be surprised if we fell outside the top 20 or 30.
I have always held true to the belief that there is a triangle of things needed to be a successful team in FRC.
People
Support
Funding
You can use a surplus of one of these to overcome a lack of others.
179 is very lucky in that we have a very dedicated group of mentors and in 2018 especially a surplus of talented students. So we had People
We have had our shop donated to be us by the school district since 2001, we also have a good relationship with the adult education center who share the property with us. This gives us the Support we need to not have to pay rent or invest in any welding equipment.
So because of this we didn’t need to spend money. Our router was purchased seasons before hand so does not factor into our budget. Our robot went through significantly less revisions thanks to having more skilled eyes on it during CADing so less resources were wasted.
I am not trying to toot our own horn or make this thread about us specifically but it just seemed easier to post this here publicly and hopefully facilitate a positive discussion
Likewise I know a fair number of teams in our area have similar or higher budgets than us, but we have really great mentor and shop resources. We have 2 CNCs, all the basic manual machines, 10ish mentors with engineering degrees, and space for a full field. We are extremely lucky to have the space and mentors we have. Beyond a base line budget to cover robot parts, I think people and shop resources make a much bigger difference than money.
Money is too specific. Capital would be better. I envision a correlation between school-based teams and school property. This isn’t money, but it sure is something critical to most teams.
But capital in general is too broad. A team of 100 could still fall short of winning. Experience, as stated many times above, is necessary.
Nope, I pay $6000 and still don’t win.