62 Qualification Outrage

At the SoCal state tournament, team 62A was on an alliance that got to the semifinals. It was posted on robotevents and in many documents from vex and the RECF that all tournament semifinalists qualify to worlds. Then, it was ruled that 62 played illegal defense, resulting in a DQ from semi finals 1-3. However, Tarek and the event managers explicitly stated every team in that semi finals match would be given a worlds invite and that 62 was only disqualified from that particular match, which was completely consistent with the information everywhere else. Nowhere were any complete event disqualifications even mentioned. Despite this, the RECF has unilaterally decided 62 did not qualify to worlds and has not issued them a worlds qualification spot or recognized them as a semifinalist on robotevents.com. They have not provided any reason for this decision and it goes against the event details they themselves published.

This raises a legitimate question about whether the California RECF can be trusted. This is the second incident of underhandedness from the RECF in just a few weeks, and there are whispers of teams or entire organizations quitting vex. I hope it doesn’t come to this, but it may if the RECF can’t get their act together.

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If a team was disqualified during a semifinal match only, but semifinalist qualifies for Worlds, then they should absolutely qualify for Worlds, as per the rules. I can’t comment on anything else, however.

I suggest that the team look for the region rep to check out the reason behind this decision.

And of course, maybe the OP can post this in the official thread and hopefully we will get an official answer.

I would love to see them again at worlds, especially if they truly deserved to go there.

I accidentally un-deleted a user-deleted post in this thread. I have re-deleted it. My bad.

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During eliminations there is no team DQ possible. Only complete alliance DQ even if only 1 team causes an infraction.

Only possibly explanation, going by the written rules at least, is an event DQ for team 62A. That seems unlikely however since 62A is listed as the robot skills winner.

Disclaimer: I know nothing of the event in question.

If they won the robot skills award even if they were denied a worlds spot through the tournament they should still have received a world spot for robot skills right?

I think that competition had 14 spots, which means, robot skills winner doesn’t qualify. (In my opinion, spot allocation for 13 spots is lot fairer since robot skills winner does qualify, but that doesn’t really relate to this thread.)

Is 6007X in the same situation as well? I saw that they didn’t get a semifinalists award either.

Yes, but apparently they were DQ’d from the whole event.

The question is - what happened or what did they do during the match that required such drastic action?
Especially if they had not been DQ at all before the SF.

The referee or the EP should clarify what happened so that it can be a learning point for everybody.

I heard that it was for drilling into their pneumatic tanks for mounting. Can’t modify pneumatic tanks. So it was an issue with their robot.

Shouldn’t this be picked up during inspection?

Ideally, yes. Bear in mind that I don’t even live in California, so I can’t say too much about what happened. But apparently, it wasn’t.

There are times I wish there was more transparency in these sorts of decisions for the teams involved. Like why an event wide DQ was made and such.

For 6007: The first question I would ask, if I were a referee, is would the modification be match affecting. Did the modification of drilling holes change the outcome of any match, as well as did the event give a warning before disqualifying 6007 from the event?
For 62: If a competition offers a reward for a certain accomplishment, and if the accomplishment is reached fair and square but the competition is not giving the reward, this is considered a scam and is against the law.

It doesn’t matter if it’s match affecting or not, the rule is very clearly described here.

Drilling the holes is a modification that is illegal. Even if not warned or not, that’s competing with an illegal robot for the entire tournament.

And furthermore, here:

So an event-wide DQ seems to be in order.

I have no dog in the fight since I am from Canada but the RECF and the EP may have thought that since the illegal mod gave the team some sort of advantage throughout the tournament, it warranted a complete DQ from the event.

As for the skills, there are at least two possible explanations. 1 explanation would be that they did not use their pneumatics at all for skills in which case they did not want to be over punitive. A second explanation may be that they simply missed it and allowed the skills scores to stand. I am not sure how TM works since I am not an event partner, but I hear from friends there are some things that do not happen automatically.

Generally speaking, I have a lot of respect for 62A and have no personal knowledge of the event or of the alleged infraction. I am only commenting on the suggested reason they may have been DQ. If the DQ was for some other reason than a pneumatic tank alteration, then who knows.

The OP said it was for illegal defense. I would be curious as to what the illegal defense was, that warranted such a harsh penalty if that is what it was. Did they install a saw blade that was cutting the other robots apart? We really need more info. Video would be helpful.

I am fully aware that it is Illegal, but accordig to <R21> a disqualification is only applied if the team gains or has an intention of gaining an advantage in the tournament.

I don’t think you can argue that a team doesn’t have an intent to gain an advantage by drilling holes into the pneumatic tanks.

That’s a clear method of trying to gain something. So a DQ should be applied.

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There may be a number of other violations at play that had the cumulative effect of warranting extreme measures - <S1> and <G1> are examples.

I would like to clear some things up here.

6007 and 62 were both disqualified, but for very different reasons.

6007X was disqualified from the event for modifying pneumatics, which was considered to be a serious safety violation.

The 7700R, 62A, 363A alliance was disqualified from SF-2 for a violation of <SG6>.