Something brought up in the FMA discord recently (credit to Josh from 2191) was this update to the way district points were earned for playoff performance. It appears that the intent of this update was to change the way points were awarded to back-up robots if brought in durring the finals. But when looking at this section a bit closer, it appears that winning a single match in the finals, regardless of winning the best of three series, earns the finalist alliance an additional 5 district points. This would mean that the finalist alliance could now earn 25 or 20 district points, rather than only 20. Does this look like an oversight or is this an intentional change? Or is there something I’m missing?
This could be an oversight or intentional. Maybe worth a Q&A.
The specific phrase missing that changes it is “All teams on the ALLIANCE winning a particular playoff series receive 5 points per match won” (emphasis mine). This required the alliance to win the series in order to receive any points, so it was effectively 10 or 0 district points to the alliance.
This was the case prior to Double Elim also, but it still had the 5 points per win and that was applied to backups. So if a backup came in during F2 and the alliance won the series, the backup got 5 points for the 1 win the participated in.
I think awarding 5 points per win in finals, regardless of whether the alliance wins the series, is a good thing. It rewards alliances which perform well enough to push it to a 3rd match, even though they ultimately lose, since it’s the only Best-Of series in the tournament now. But it could be unintentional that they left it out, and it’s intended to be the same as it has been.
Merged from a different thread because I didn’t see this thread:
In previous years manuals (both before the switch to double elimination and after), points in the finals or any best of 3 rounds were awarded as (paraphrasing a bit here) “5 points per robot per match won, only if you win the round”. This was to account for backup robots, opposed to saying just winning 10 points for winning the round.
For example, if a robot won 1 match in the finals but lost the set of matchs (1-2), the robot would get 0 points for that round. If a backup robot was tagged in to the final match of the finals and won, the backup robot would be awarded 5 points, and 5 points would go to the robot that exited the alliance for their previous win in the round
However in section 11.1.3 of the 2024 manual, the “only if you win the round” part of the rule seems to be omitted. Because of this, it seems like you could win 1 match in the finals at any point and instantly get 5 district points, regardless if you win finals or not.
To me, this seems like an oversight, and I was wondering if anyone would be willing to toss this into the Q&A to clarify intent. Seems like a big change that is flying under the radar. Id like to know if I need to make changes to https://frclocks.com/ or not.
I would disagree, it would water down the value of winning the event, and if you get a 2-0 victory, less district points are generated than a 2-1 win, which is just… strange. Unless you want to always play 3 matches even if the 3rd match is meaningless to winning the event, there’s still 15 points on the line that should be played for
I think this change was to address the issue where a robot could have played with alliance up until finals, then after being replaced by a backup robot should that alliance win any matches in the final, the first team would get less than 20 points with the math they are using.
This is not a clean fix for that but with this change the robot in the above scenario would gain points as the alliance won matches in the finals.
It seems like the true fix for this is to just consider the double elim portion and the finals as two separate entities entirely where one doesn’t effect the other. Double elim portion you get a percentage of points for the matches you played, in finals you get 5 points per win if you win finals
Brandon and I brought this up to FIRST last season after we found it, and I think the new rules fixed that issue. I think that while updating the rules to fix that, they might have accidentally introduced this new finals change.
Intuitively this makes sense, because the alliance that stays on the top bracket all the way through can only lose one match in order to win the event (stay on top and win 2 matches to 1 in the finals) the team that takes the scenic route to the finals can lose two and still win the event (lose 1 to get on the bottom, then lose 1 of 3 in the finals)
Because of this it does make sense to model the district points based on “made it to the finals, then extra points on top of that if you win”
It’s interesting to me that “finalists” has had a meaning for a long time. Awards are “winner” and “finalist”
Is this considering both alliances to be finalists? If not, there isn’t a point bonus for the winner. That makes an awkward situation where we’d see the following points:
20-25 for a runner up (Depending on if they won a match or not)
13 for 3rd place
10 for winner
7 for 4th place
Overall, this needs cleaning up. The use of colloquial here versus defined terms also makes it more awkward.
The examples make it clear that winners are considered finalists. As the rules are written right now, both alliances in finals get 20 points + 5 points per match win.
