Hello,
We’re a team in Asia who (unfortunately) only travels to one VEX event every year, meaning that aside from the skills challenges, we only ever get to have one chance a year to qualify for Worlds through the Excellence Award.
As the event we have been attending (VEX FORMOSA) annually has been a level one event, only one robot is allowed to qualify for the World Championship.
This year, one of the major competing teams graduated, and thus I thought that, given that the robot my team constructed this year was better than the ones last year, we would have a greater chance at the Excellence Award.
However, while looking at the description of the event at robotevents.com, I found that this year, they changed one rule.
“This event will qualify one team from Taiwan to the 2015 VEX World Championship. Teams from all over the world are welcome to come compete but only a team representing Taiwan will earn a place at the 2015 VEX World Championship.”
This rule had me wondering: Is it possible for a host to designate the world championship slot specifically? If, for example, one robot that was not from Taipei were to win the Programming Skills and Robot Skills Awards (purely hypothetical though), and the Tournament Champion Award, then would it be allowed (and justified) for the hosts to give the Excellence Award to a Taipei team for the sole sake of awarding the World Championship slot to that team, even if the award should have gone to the non-Taipei robot?