What if there was a regional like IRI?
Just everyone agreed to go to same regional to make the biggest high score and have the best, fun, exciting, hardest regional ever!!! Maybe waterloo since 148 admitted the hardest regional is up north. (the stats don’t lie! 
)
One problem is travel costs. It might be good for Canadian teams, but what if you had to travel to southern california for a regional, would you still attend? In addition, I feel the main purpose of regionals is to progressively separate the better teams from the rest each season. This of course goes into championships as well.
It would be pretty dope though.
There is one!
It is known as IRI 
:ahh:
There is: It’s called MSC.
not the same cause of rule changes in IRI and not everyone comes to IRI like 148 1678 254… and not everyone there at msc but another location could be chosen to be more central
148 was going to go to IRI but couldn’t because of a trip to China. 254 normally attends. It’s really hard to do an official regional with all the good teams due to location and costs, even IRI can be hard to attend.
Actually, they don’t. MAYBE they’ve attended once.
I agree, it’ll be difficult just to get everybody to an official regional…
If I remember correctly, they’ve gone twice in the past six years (2011, 2014). It’s hard for California teams to attend IRI, I believe that was part of the motivation of making Chezy Champs an invitational tournament.
What about making the NYC regional something special. With more support that regional could be insane. There is enough room to have 2 regional’s plus the FTC, FLL, and Fll Jr. competitions.
Its a good location for tourism but it is expensive.
Meh, Whatever I just want to play with/see the elite teams. 
It’d definately be really cool to have a regional like IRI. Have an application process and accept teams. There are a few issues with it though. FIRST would have to help a little bit.
First of all, the entry fee at IRI is $750 and a backpack with school supplies if I remember correctly. The entry fee for many regionals is $5000+. First would have to work to make a reduced cost since almost everyone would come from a distance.
Secondly, the IRI qualification rank is pretty messed up. They use the same rankings as first uses during the regular season usually. The only issue with that is that when you have an event full of powerhouses, a lot of your rank can be determined by your schedule. It evens out very little during the event. So if every match I have is with 1114 and 2056 and 254 and 118…, then I will have a really good ranking. Where if each match, I only have an alliance with 1 of those bots, then my ranking won’t be as well. It’s sort of hard to explain but ranking are pretty inaccurate at IRI. That’s why this year, 2122 was ranked really low an ended up being the “value pick” of alliance selections
Third of all, IRI tries to make it so only the top alliances can win. It’s near impossible for an 8th alliance to advance to the next round. This year was a rare occurrence where 2122 and 107 were really really good picks for their alliance. I don’t think that first would want to have an official season event where the bottom alliance isn’t equal to the top alliance as far as picks go.
Rule changes would probably be an issue to FIRST. I don’t think they’d let anyone advance to world from an IRI like regional because IRI rule changes make the game essentially a different game.
But I really like the thought behind this. I think you were mostly talking about the caliber of teams at an event. The only thing that would come in apply are points 1 and 2.
2014, 2009 and 2007 iirc.
Sounds a bit like championships…
Assuming you could identify who would build the best robots before the robots were even built(impossible) I think you would have trouble convincing the best teams to compete in an event many times harder than 2champs while they could be spending their time actually qualifying for 2champs.
Unlike a division at Worlds, IRI has 60(?) of the top teams in the world. IIRC, most divisions have only a few extreme powerhouse teams.
Point of IRI regional is to get as many powerhouse teams to an event but everything will operate just like a regional with no rule changes. Maybe something can be done fro the cost but I don’t know.