I was a state competition this weekend trying to qualify for one of the spots at worlds. Many of the state teams arrived to the competition with agreements for alliances, while our team arrived to the competition with no alliance. When the time to form alliances came, we had no alliance because all where pre-agreed on weeks before the event. We Ranked #3 and according to the game manual if someone rejects me they CANNOT be chosen by another alliance. Some of teams complained the rule, and the event coordinator changed the rule allowing teams that reject another alliance to remain eligible to choose by another team forcing us to play with the last ranked team.
He claimed that since it is a small tournament of 16 teams he has leeway to change the rules as he see fit as per the event modification rule; but upon reading the event modification rules it only mentions that he can change to a 2 teams alliance format, it does not say that he event coordinator can change the alliance selection process rules. Can an event coordinator change the alliance selection process rules?
Did everybody reject you or something? If there are only 16 teams, that means only 8 teams didn’t make top 8, and if all 8 of those teams rejected you then I can see why the event coordinator would have to change the rules to continue the tournament.
Yeah, he did not have the authority to do so. This is not okay. You should contact your region’s RECF rep, and if they refuse to do anything, take it up higher in the food chain. This is a serious alteration to the rules and sounds like it may have had a large impact on the outcome of the tournament.
It is from a previous season. Try searching on Google with the term “site:vexforum.com”.
I have written a specific Q&A about this topic about altering rules, and I still haven’t had an answer yet: https://vexforum.com/t/answered-altered-rules-clarification/46089/1
When it is answered by the VEX GDC(if they do say that referees must abide by the logic of the rules), simply print that out with the Alliance selection rule below:
I wanted to make that specific Q&A to further help teams if it is obvious that something in a competition is clearly not with the game manual, as well as it would definitely be of use to help from the excuse “I am the referee, I make the rules.” I have been told that a couple of times a long time ago even when physically showing evidence to the referees(I was in another region though, so this wasn’t in South Texas) that what they are saying is not true of the rules.
He defiantly can’t do that. The whole point of the alliance selection process is the strategy behind it. I don’ see why people would make alliances before hand at our competitions we never know whats gonna happen till the rankings come up
I agree fully. This has been happening across so many regions as what I’ve been hearing as well.
Also,
Something similar to this happened during Tossup, where one team that was the 1st seed team captain team was denied all the way through the 8th seed, forcing them to pick a team that can’t deny them. This is close enough, but imagine that feeling of getting denied 7 times…
The first step is to contact the RECF rep for your region. Do you know who that is? If not, where are you and I can look it up for you.
If you get no satisfaction there, then I would definitely go higher up. That is completely wrong and the EP way overstepped his bounds. Basically, from the rules, that tournament should not count as a qualifying event because in order to qualify, the rules must be followed including the alliance selection process.
Shame on the teams for complaining but even more, shame on the EP for changing things if that is what happened.
You can find your RECF rep here
This is unusual, because, in my experience, RECF reps usually are present for the Worlds-Qualifying competitions in their region. Maybe that’s just Matt
Was this the Wyoming VRC State Championship? I just looked through robotevents.com and this seems to be the most likely tournament. They have some additional issues with that tournament. For example, they had only 14 teams. According to page 24 of the current game manual, tournaments with 17 or fewer teams will have 2 team alliances.
There is also a minimum of 16 registered teams and the tournament only had 15 registered teams.
According to the document linked below, “The event must follow the Official Rules in the Game Manual (including tournament/alliance selection guidelines) and Tournament Manager results must be uploaded within 48 hours of event completion.”
There is a lot that looks wrong with this. I would definitely work to get this fixed. There are two potential fixes, as I see it. The RECF may have other ideas. One would be to redo the tournament and run it correctly. That would include getting another team registered for the event (and hopefully two or more additional teams participating). The other would be to invalidate the whole thing and simply go based on skills scores.
Good luck. I hope the RECF is concerned enough about their reputation that they fix this.
If it is Wyoming, there is an additional problem. You only have 1 hs spot and 1 ms spot so it would go to the HS excellence award winner and ms excellence award winner. There is no ms team in Wyoming with a skills score and only 1 hs team with a skills score so if they simply invalidated the tournament and went to skills scores, there would be no ms team from Wyoming going and 10001A would get to worlds on the virtue of a 20 point skills score.
