Well I said I wasn’t going to comment anymore in this thread but I actually have some info about this situation in California.
Teams 6627A and 6627B collaborated to build a skills robot and competed with it under both numbers. These scores were added to the global skills ranking and both exceeded the eventual cutoff to get to worlds. Then, they received an email from a California RECF official saying plate swapping was against the ethos of the competition (even though at that time it had been explicitly ruled legal) and their skills scores would be removed from the global skills ranking. For the record, they were not the only organization that engaged in plate swapping or qualified to worlds because of it. I used them as an example because they collaborated to build their robot together, so they weren’t causing any ethical problems or breaking any known rules at the time. However, for some reason they were the only organization the California RECF employees saw fit to remove from the global skills ranking.
Fortunately, 6627A and B were state finalists and B received the excellence award at states, qualifying them both for worlds.
And then the rule was updated that ruled plate swapping illegal for everyone, not just people in California.
With respect to everyone, the GDC should establish clear rules at the beginning of the season that they maintain throughout the whole season, and the RECF should employ people that fairly apply these rules. Until these organizations do this, there’s inevitably going to be some confusion.
Based on this, my assumption is that the GDC disapproved of plate-swapping, but couldn’t find a way to regulate it, so they let it be legal at first. However, they did discourage it, and knew that many teams would consider it unethical anyway, so they likely expected plate-swapping to be rare.
Later (likely after they pointed out that it was legal), VEX saw that many teams were plate-swapping after all, and were gaining success from this, and decided to make plate-swapping illegal even though they had no way of enforcing it.
As for the teams who used plate-swapping when it was legal, I agree that I wouldn’t blame them too much. VEX (and a lot of teams) likely expected them to feel plate-swapping was unethical, but there were other teams who had legitimate reasons to feel plate-swapping was okay.
The short answer to this will be economy of scale and cost effectiveness.
There are certain guidelines for us to follow in order to bring the kids overseas, eg. at least 2 teachers per trip - and that means the school will still need to pay for the 2 teachers’ trip even if it is just for 1 team (of maybe 4 students?). If that’s the case, then the school admin might decide to put that money over to another trip that will benefit more students.
And economy of scale in terms of the equipment. It will be almost the same amount of (additional or spare) equipment that we need to bring for 1 team or 2 teams.
There are many facets and layers to how the removal of skills qualifications affect small regions, eg. is it even worth the effort to organise an event just for 1 MS spot?
I might put up a post on it if there are enough interest… else I wouldn’t want to bore you guys with another long post.
But meanwhile, let’s not derail this thread. The discussion has been very good so far.
I think he is referring to a small region a great distance away.
In past years our region has organize a charter bus to bring multiple teams to Worlds. So, I would think that if you bundle the MS with the HS teams, there would be some economy of scale.
Think I have mentioned in quite a few places that I know they are not targeting any specific regions. I was just using the MS spot as an example… I don’t have MS team.
But regarding skills qualifications, I still stand by what I have said - the measures taken is too extreme and the wrong regions are being punished. Collateral damage.
Regarding MS VRC as a ghost town… I do have that same sentiment as you.
In fact, I have that feeling that they are trying to push the MS teams into IQ. Most likely I am wrong though.
And it’s the opposite in Virginia. There aren’t many MS IQ teams but there are plenty of MS VRC teams. We have an allocation of 8 - 9 slots to Worlds each year. I believe the award is on a pro-rata basis - so the more teams you have, the more Worlds spots you get.
I’ll bet Indiana gets a boatload of MS IQ worlds slots!
I have that same sentiment as well. For VA, it just will never grow due to MS VRC being so entrenched and particular players not encouraging IQ growth, while we’ve stagnated at the MS VRC level.
VRC can be hard for some MS students. It’s why when I was affiliated with a school I started my 6th grade out in IQ and then my advanced 7th graders did VRC and others did IQ then in 8th grade they all did VRC.
I don’t know why there’s really no MS VRC IQ in Virginia (probably politics of some sort!). Like you point out, some kids are ready for VRC, some are not at the MS level. Some younger kids are just terrified of the tools (dremel). Some kids could really benefit from IQ and there may be better retention and more growth in VRC if there were more IQ teams at the MS level.
In one county, I can point it to politics due to some discussions I’ve had and things I’ve asked and been told. It’s more popular north of that county due to them getting started later in VEX.
Lots of great FRC teams in Virginia. Lots of Vex kids also do FRC. There are things I really like about Vex over FRC - such as the fact the team members do not have to specialize. You can dabble in multiple roles on a Vex team. Teams are smaller - so more personal responsibility. But this post isn’t a Vex versus FRC post…
If your concern is the number of spots for one grade level, you could hold a combined national championship for middle and high school.
I’m not sure what would happen if middle school teams won more qualifying awards than they had spots, but I assume the middle school teams would win the first spots they had, and the other spots would go to high school teams on Skills scores. (That is, if a region had 3 HS spots and 1 MS spot, like Singapore, and hosted a combined championship, the MS Excellence winner would get the MS spot, the HS Excellence winner and any HS tournament champions would get HS spots, and I assume any remaining spots would go to the next best HS teams in Skills.)
Alternatively, if a region had another nation or state close by, I suppose they could hold a Regional Championship that would include both of their nations/states (like what Nebraska and Iowa do).
“Kevin Anderson rallied from two sets down to shock Roger Federer 2-6, 6-7 (5), 7-5, 6-4, 13-11 and move into the Wimbledon 2018 semi-finals on Wednesday after a four-hour classic on Court No. 1.”
This was a reverse sweep by the competitor that was predicted to lose in this Bo5. I wonder if Roger Federer is saying that Kevin Anderson won because of luck… This my friends is why you play the game!
You are correct that in any best-of-X system, adding a pair of matches can flip the results an unlimited number of times.
However, the difference between Bo1 and Bo3 is enormous. The difference between Bo3 and Bo5 is much smaller.
In Bo1, something extremely rare (even one in a million) could eliminate you from the tournament, no matter how good your robot is. In Bo3, even if something extremely rare causes you to lose a match, it won’t make you lose the other two, so if you are the best by a landslide, you are almost certain to win.
Bo5 (or anything beyond that) merely gives you some extra second chances, so if you underperformed the first few times, you can make up for it later.
