Here in Indiana, we recently went from 10 to 14 worlds spots. The way its supposed to work is that ALL semi finalists, design award winner, and excellence award winners go to worlds, but I have heard that there is some speculation that that won’t happen. Some say that it will be the 6 finalists, design, excellence, 2 skills spots and 2 other spots I can’t seem to remember. Does anyone know what is going to happen for sure?
@blatwell You seem to know things about Indiana’s stuff, so I tagged you to see if you knew.
It is spelt out in the VRC Qualifying Criteria document that all have access to (linked in the documents of the event)
14 ==
1 Excellence Award
3 Tournament Champions
3 Tournament Finalists
6 Semi Finalists
1 Design Award
I think the clarification we wanted was that we would go to that distribution, or stay with the 10 spot distribution and just have 4 more spots from skills since they are bonus spots.
Who knows what will happen until they tell you? I know there is supposed to be a particular way of doing it but in the past, that has not always been followed. Last year, in California, the sportsmanship award earned a spot to worlds. So did other awards not listed on the form.
They may have experienced a lot of growth in California that enabled them to send more teams than what was initially listed in the document. In 2016-2017 they had 43 spots to the World Championship. Nothing from 3 state championships indicates that they didn’t follow the document.
If Indiana has 14 spots, they are to be distributed as follows:
1 Excellence
1 Design Award
3 Tournament Champions
3 Tournament Finalists
6 Semi Finalist
== 14 spots
Robot Skill Champion will not qualify for Worlds.
If one of the two judged awards are part of the Tournament Champions, Finalists, and Semi-Finalists, then the spots are awarded to the highest ranking skills team.
All spelled out in the VRC Qualifying Criteria document for events with up to 15 World spots.
I was about to comment on that. That’s still from when it was only ten spots. It seems that they were trying to make it impossible to get to worlds through Indiana skills unless you actually cough up the $200 to go to state, or hope there’s a double qualification (which would be likely but not something you can count on). If it had been set up correctly, there would be one spot guaranteed through skills, coming to the event or not.
But the new spots means that (if it’s done according to the document) you have to be at state to get to worlds (except for a possible 2 double qualifications or being in the top 35 in the world).
I’m sure they are still in the process of updating the awards on the event page, now that the bonus spots have been announced. That takes some time and coordination.
@lacsap is completely right, the REC’s Qualifying Criteria defines the how World Qualification spots are awarded at a State Tournament. We have hosted a State competition and the REC is diligent that it’s followed correctly. The REC has done a good job of making the qualification process consistent across the different states. Evolving the process and documentation around it over time.
According to the document, 16 or more teams have specific awards that earn a spot and all others come from global skills rankings. In California last year, that was not followed. This year, each region in CA gets 14 spots and they are following the document.
If the RECF was so diligent, then CA would have done it correctly in their three different regions but that is not the case.
If RECF was so diligent, then when Indiana had only 10 spots, it would have been set up according to the document.
The reality in practice is that the RECF seems to give some room to change things in order to encourage everyone to go to the state/regional tournaments regardless of the expense.
In Indiana, now that the matrix encourages pay to play more than it did when we had 10 spots, we will likely follow the matrix even though we were not following it when the matrix did not encourage pay to play as much as the way they set it up.
I am not trying to slam anyone here. If I was the event partner and had a 70,000 seat stadium reserved along with thousands of dollars worth of expensive parking and I had doubled and tripled the cost of the state tournaments to do that, I would do everything I could to make it necessary for teams to go through my tournament.
I support following pre-established criteria for world’s spots. Transparency is very important in these things, and it gives students specific goals to work toward. It has been frustrating in the past when there was not clear communication about where all spots would come from for a specific region.
However, it is also frustrating that with 14 spots there is not a guaranteed spot through skills. I have always felt that skills scores were the great equalizer for the randomness of qualifying, politics of alliance selection, moments of misfortune in elimination rounds, and slightly subjective nature of judged awards.
My opinion is that every region should have at least one guaranteed qualification spot through skills, preferably multiple spots.
I’d argue that we have more teams, so maybe the competition is tougher, but by the current skills ranks Hawaii’s 5 best robots are all higher ranked than our 2nd best robot. You, sir, have one tough region to get out of.
That’s what we thought, but robot skills is the default qualifier when there are repeats, so we thought it would be weird to have multiple skills spots designated.
Definitely almost impossible to make it to Worlds from here. 359 and 4142 are always our champs with the exception of a lucky 3rd alliance or extra skills spot (those two teams also always take Excellence).
What sucks is knowing that we could definitely be competitive at Worlds but having one of the hardest regions to qualify from. One day…