Our teams just completed their ONE competition in South Korea that could give them a seat in the worlds.
We were in 1st and 2nd place going into the finals. But the local rule does not allow teams to choose alliances for the final games. So the organizers arranged the 4 finalists into a final 3 games. The team with the most wins/highest score gets the seat for the worlds.
Our 2 teams lost 1 game each – we did not get the seat to the worlds.
However, we walked away with the Programming Champion and Robot Skills Champion trophies — having the highest scores in these categories.
*Does anyone know how many seats a country can get to the worlds and how a country can increase seats into the worlds? *
Also, given our “loss” (although we “won” in 2 categories), this gives a strong impression that the tournament matches comes out as more important than Programming Skills and Robot Skills categories. Is that the case?
One of our teams was already the highest scoring in matches, highest scoring in programming, highest scoring in robot skills. Yet due to a local rule of having 3 final games for the top 4 teams — that caused a major upset to us. In this case, “luck” could really be on the side of the winning team.
The overall qualifying spots given to a country/region are based on the # of teams from that region, for example, California has the most qualifying spots out of any region, where as South Korea may only get 2 spots, the only other way is to be in the top 30 of either skills rankings.
To clarify, the event organizers did notify the change in format to the teams beforehand via their website. What I am wondering about is if event organizers can make such modifications, even if they notified teams beforehand.
They should not be able too, that doesn’t make any sense.
I happen to be watching the Superbowl right now…that would be like the NFL suddenly saying…hmm…lets make touchdowns worth 5 points tonight, and field goals are worth 4.
You can’t just make up your own rules when you are part of a competition with official rules and guidelines.
In general the number of VRC World Championship slots is allocated based on the number of registered teams in a country. If there was 1 slot available for South Korea then the only documented method of winning this is to be awarded the Excellence Award as described in the game manual. On the event page http://www.robotevents.com//robot-competitions/archived-seasons/vrc/vrc-season-2014-2015/re-vrc-15-2438.html it lists Excellence Award as qualifying for world championship. Have a chat with your local event partner Jong-Chun WOO [email protected] and if that doesn’t provide any answers contact the RECF representative for your region [email protected]
There is allowance made for this in the rules under <T01>. Note: I do not believe this rule was put in for referees to create new rules or modify the basic game rules as they are stated. More to allow a bit of wiggle room where there can be multiple understandings on how a rule is written.
As far as I’m the Event Partner would have “Ultimate authority” over the event layout such as a change like this. Also as Team 6724 stated, team were notified of this change before the event.
Modifications to the finals match layout have been done before, such as with the California State Championships last year (where they added a ninth alliance). Or with the 2012 RWC Tournament in NZ (where teams stayed with a pre-chosen alliance partner for the entirety of the competition and then had a different style of elimination matches as well).
On topic, Jason has pretty much stated all the official things you need to know. You may also want to read the World Championship Qualifying Criteria (High School document has been linked). this document also lists the ranking of the ‘importance’ of the different awards.
With the 22 teams that registered for the event you can qualify up to 4 teams from that event, however in this instance it would probably be limited by countries qualification spots. There was a discussion about this earlier in the year on this thread. I do not the think the World Qualification spots were ever released though. [Rick TYler, maybe we could have an update please?]
If the Event Partner stated who was getting the qualification spots at the tournament, I do not think you will have any luck in getting them to change their mind. Hopefully, your score will high enough to qualify through skills, as these qualification spots are independent of how many a country is given.
The rules do not allow for the change to alliance selection described here. I would think that would disqualify the event from being a World Championship qualifier. I recommend the OP contact their RECF representative for a clarification as recommended above.
Pretty sure <T01> only pertains to match play, not event structure. It would only ever be an Event Partner that twists the norm to suit a particular situation and one would hope approval is sought from RECF. Personally I think it’s a bad look when a global competition isn’t consistent especially when everything is black and white in a game manual. That said I’m sure some valid reasoning was applied in this case.
I guess now is a good time to re-iterate that the Excellence Award is higher than “winning” since it encompasses every aspect of VRC. It’s a shame this [aparently] wasn’t used to determine who advanced from South Korea.
Yes, my understanding is that as <T01> only mentions referees it only applies to referees, and referees are only responsible for rules enforcement during matches (and skills runs).
If event partners were able to make the final decision on qualifications even without RECF’s approval, I think it’s pretty easy to imagine how that could become a problem. (I’m looking at you, Oklahoma :rolleyes:).
Hopefully the EP did clear this qualification with RECF beforehand, but it can’t hurt to find out.
Just so that no one gets confused, this is exactly how the rules are written. From page 1 of the 2014-2015 League Play manual:
In addition, the Excellence Award is listed as a “Robot Performance Award,” though it does take both robot performance and judged performance into account. Additionally, when using the “Excellence calculator” system, 4 out of the 7 points available are earned through judged performance, except that in cases of a tie, the higher-ranked team receives 1 point, making it an even 4-4 split.