Does anyone else find it odd that a skills only event would have skills scores entered well before the event begins? Interestingly enough, 2 of those scores have made it to the top 50 in the world.
Sometimes event partners will test tournament manager with scores. Was it days before the event, or minutes?
I assume you are talking about this event:
https://www.robotevents.com/robot-competitions/vex-robotics-competition/RE-VRC-17-1190.html
Few things:
- Maybe they ran it a day early since school was in? Because you are right, the dates don’t match.
- There aren’t 16 active teams so the scores wouldn’t normally count toward World list.
- Generally you aren’t allowed to have that many teams from the same school at the same event.
- Only 4 teams of all that signed up/ran even tried programming skills and only 2 ran more than once.
- Only 4 teams tried driver skills more than once.
All of the above can be made exceptions if the local RECF representative feels it was valid. So it’s up to them.
Give the lead team credit though, just their driver score at this event is almost as high as their total for just a few days before at their State tournament and their season high. And, their programming score went up by > 100% in a week. They must have lived in the lab getting this going.
Yes. That is the one I was talking about. Yesterday, there were only 11 teams with a score and then very late at night, the top score was added.
I was not aware that the RECF had the authority to suspend the rules regarding the number of teams needed to be a qualifying event. What other rules are they allowed to suspend or disregard?
The number of schools allowed at an event can be whatever an event partner wants it to be. That said, in this case the event partner made the limit 4 teams but only made an exception for his own school. That does not seem reasonable.
I hate to say this, but these scores are suspect and should not be in the global rankings (which they are right now). They may end up keeping a good team from making it. The rules need to be followed.
I hope this is just a case of the EP testing things and not really knowing what he is doing with TM and it can be corrected. I would hate to see one or more teams not get an invite because teams got in due to rules not being followed.
If you look at the two teams that made the World list from that event (if it’s over), they increased their best season skills scores by around 50% within a week. That’s tough to do. However, one of their sister teams has had very good scores consistently, so there is the chance that they cloned that bot during the week. That is perfectly legitimate. Hopefully they didn’t just switch plates and run the sister robot as theirs (which people do, this year is the first time I think there was a rule specifically preventing that).
The agenda states that the event runs from 7AM until 12PM, so it’s not a surprise there were late night entries. But I do agree that the format is way off, especially a scheduled 17 hour competition.
If you have concerns then I would suggest you email your local RECF rep and have them discuss it with the RECF rep for that region.
Actually, the event was to start today (Saturday 3/11/17) at 7am and end at noon (12pm). Hence the concerned of results being posted before the event takes place. The event has the prerequisite minimum of 16 teams listed for a skills only qualifying event.
Agreed, the course of action is to contact your Regional Manager if you have concerned about a particular event.
^^ you’re right on the time. I have been repeatedly confused by dates on the robot events website this year. When they put deadline they use 12AM like this:
Registration Deadline: Sat, Mar 11, 2017 12:02 AM EST
Which means the registration deadline is not Saturday (only for 2 minutes) it’s really Friday. I’ve missed a couple of sign ups due to this.
Yes, except it is a free event. So in doing a number of teams may sign up and not many attend. Just like happened at the event. We had a skills only event planned and could only get 14 teams to sign up ($) so they wouldn’t let us have it. Which is legitimate, but all 14 of those would have come. It seems wrong to sign up nearly 2x the number that actually come then count the scores. What if only 4 came? Which is really the number of teams that scored much at this event?
Not sure which event you are speaking of but it can be a good way to get help in setting up an event. We enticed some students to help set up the night before at our event. So if you put an hour of work in and we got things working, then you could do some skills run (after an early inspection).
Free labor!
From the qualifying criteria document on events;
“From time to time, the REC Foundation may make an exception to one of these criteria in
order to better support a growing state/province/region/nation. For more information, please contact
your REC Foundation Regional Support Manager.”
We saw it happen as IQ was blooming in our state, it seems reasonable.
Teams participating at the event deserve a level playing field and allow competing teams to witness skill runs. The thought had crossed my mind, but to me it is unethical as the event start happens as the agenda indicates. Same way as you do not want law makers having proceedings in secret - hence sunshine laws. I have no problems letting teams practice the night before.
What we did for our State competition was to give “fast-passes” to teams that volunteered the day before and provided volunteers the day of. The “fast-pass” allowed the teams to bypass the skills line and get in front. They got one per volunteer and it was torn in half after is was used once.
As some have said, this is suspect.
- Scores posted before the event was to even start.
- Stated limit of 4 teams per organization but host has 8 teams in
- less than 16 teams competing
- Two teams at this event (both from the host school) break into the top 50 in global rankings by huge increases in their prior best scores from 1 week earlier.
On many levels, this is suspect.
I totally disagree with the idea that it is OK to let some teams run skills the night before the tournament. It is one thing to give them a pass to the front of the line on the day of the tournament as a payment for helping out, but to allow them to actually run their skills the day before is not alright.
This definitely seems sketchy. I don’t mean to demean the teams that supposedly have these scores, but there is no way these scores are legitimate. There are obviously rules being broken here.
There were a ton of witnesses from multiple clubs doing runs. It was on the up and up. It can make for a slightly less stressful event the next day as time between matches could be short.
For this event, the one this post is referencing, there appears to be only people from three organizations. The host had 8 teams, one other organization had 3 teams, and the 3rd had 1 team. All of this was done the day before the tournament was to take place. There were fewer teams than needed for a qualifying event. The host team set up a limit of 4 teams per organization but they had twice that many. They had two teams that broke into the top 50 by having huge increases in their scores in less than 1 week. This is sort of the opposite of “the up and up.”
Assuming for a minute that these teams actually got these scores, they still should not count. They need to be done in a legitimate competition. There is video on youtube of a team scoring well into the top 50 but we do not count those scores because they were not done in a legitimate competition. I do not doubt they did what I saw them do, but it does not mean it should count.
Team80_Giraffes was referencing one of his events, not the one in this thread.
If the start of your event is the day before for setup, I have no issues. But if the agenda says it starts Saturday morning, then skills results should only be taken from runs made starting at that time.
Now the agenda has been edited to include having skills runs yesterday, but that was changed after yesterday was gone. I am sure the RECF can see when that change was made. This gives the appearance of them trying to cover something up. This is not good.
Perhaps they were just clearing up what timeframes they were doing runs.