When all States were completed, there were ~200 open spots in Worlds.
We emailed REC Foundation, and they emailed back and told us that “teams will be invited at random from the wait list on an as-needed basis.”
We have seen teams, with skill scored of ~300 points, picked out of waitlist . Obviously it was not based on performance or Global Skills Ranking.
As of today, teams with much high scores (340+, 350+, different and same regions) haven’t been picked yet.
Why does REC Foundation want to give out world ticket “randomly”?
Is it ridiculous after we have gone through so many rounds of rigorous competitions, to fight for and earn a seat at Worlds?
And in some region, it’s much competitive than others. So many strong teams were unable to make it to the Worlds. And now the tickets are just distributed without specified and solid criteria?
Waitlist will normally be activated very near the dates of worlds.
So to be fair to RECF, as much as it will be as “random” as possible, there is also a need to look at the practical aspect of things, eg. overseas teams will never be activated via waitlist (and that’s regardless of how good or bad the overseas teams are).
I am not saying I am in total agreement with how RECF decides to allocate the worlds spots (those that are around long enough will know the number of run-ins i had regarding this issue).
But in general, the approach in allocating worlds spots can be seen as a continuum or spectrum - on one extreme, it will be purely by performance-based (ie. throw out all online changes, judges award, etc). On the other extreme, it will be purely by non-performance-based, eg. Sportsmanship should get you a spot to worlds as well. Or maybe totally based on the number of teams in the region, etc.
So obviously what RECF is doing is trying to find the middle ground. But it is never easy to find the exact sweet spot.
For me, as long as the worlds qualifications via global skills ranking is available (i.e. if you are good enough, you will qualify for worlds), I will accept it and I have already made peace with this RECF allocation approach.
Do you have any evidence that teams have been selected off the waitlist? You don’t appear on the team list until you have qualified and you put in your hotel information.
If a somewhat high skills score appears on the list it was probably a double qualification at a regional event.
Some of the teams picked out of the waitlist can be pretty good, my team (in MS) got picked out of the waitlist for worlds in spin up (we didn’t make it via states because our expansion accidentally expanded after waiting a bit for our match to start) and one of the best teams there from our area (which had 15 teams there). We were 8 wins 2 losses, and 21st in our division before alliance selection. 63rd on the rankings for skills. We lost in R16 of our division though.
There are several Event Region Championships this this week/weekend (Indiana, Illinois, California Region 4), so all outstanding spots for Worlds have not yet been issued. In the same vein, there are a large number of teams that have qualified and intend to go, but have not yet finalized their registration, as they need to enter hotel information. It is likely that no teams from the waitlist have been invited yet.
Typically speaking, in VRC High School and Middle School, you don’t see that many spots awarded by waitlist. The primary purpose of the waitlist is to fill the event if there was a misestimation between the number of worlds spots granted and the number of invitations accepted (i.e. they give more world invitations than actual spots at the event, with the idea that some percentage of teams will decline).
The waitlist decreased by 50, which is highly unlikely unless all 50 teams had qualified from a late championship and that’s how they moved from the waitlist to the event list. I mean yeah 50 teams could have dropped from the waitlist, but most people just stay on there. So that’s where we are getting that invites may have been handed out, although you would otherwise be correct. And yes the RECF has said several times that waitlist is as-needed and random.
I had two teams that were on the wait list that both qualified for worlds the regular way. So they would have disappeared off of the middle school IQ waitlist and the middle school VRC waitlist.
I am the coach of 14904B and we got an invite from the waitlist on Monday. We were 2nd in Robot Skills at the Northern New York State Championship, but there were no double qualifications. We are currently 6th in NY (all of the teams above us qualified) and 312th in the world. Not sure if any of that played into us getting an invite.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but it’s performance based - if your ranking the team’s ranking is high, then they’ll go? Our team missed the qualifying slot at State by just 1 point, so they did not get an invite. Their alliance partner from that match is ranked a lot lower, had a lower average at the state championship and ranked a lot lower in skills there is going to Worlds. I understand that they’re looking for a middle ground, but to have come SO close only to have teams that rank lower to go is so frustrating. It was already tougher in the season to get a Worlds qualification. It makes no sense to then distribute the extra slots at random.
When I made the original post, the picking was still on-going. So it was hard to tell if it’s performance-based or not, although it didn’t seem performance-based.
But now there are only 9 open spots. I think it’s almost done.
As of today, a team with skill score ~300 pts (ranked 35+ in the same region) got invited out of waitlist, while a team with ~360 pts (ranked ~15 in the same region) are not picked. (I’m not going to use the team name for privacy. )
Again, I’m comparing two teams in the same region.
Do you understand how much efforts it takes to improve skill scores by ~60 pts?
It’s OK there are different paths leading to the Worlds, including tournaments, skills, online challenges, design awards, innovation awards and etc. But when it comes to give out tickets to worlds, we do need solid and clear criteria, or in another word, based on some sort of ranking.
It is still a competition.
I agree, it’s a competition from beginning to end and teams should be chosen by what they’ve accomplished. The team that was chosen is 66 points behind our team (they were our alliance partners at state, so I noticed right away that they were chosen randomly because neither of us qualified) so I get what you mean - it’s pretty difficult to improve skills by that much. It’s not just the point difference between 2 low ranking teams. Our team is ranked in the top 5 in our state - and it’s sad they nor the 2 other teams ranked ahead of them got the invitation instead.
While they may be considering skills score, for a team to get pulled off the wait list their coach had to go in and put them on the waitlist. So there’s probably some teams that look like they were skipped, when their coach simply did not elect for that option.
Trust me… coming from my region, I do know how difficult it is to qualify for worlds - for my region, all you need to do to qualify is by beating the previous season worlds high sch division champ. lol…
My personal view is that all you request RECF to consider is to push some of the waitlist spots over to the global skills ranking.
But waitlist being waitlist - it is really meant for last min situations that RECF can call upon to fill up the spots.
If needing to fill available slots very quickly - last minute - is necessary, than why not organize the waitlist in order of skills ranking? A slot becomes available - bam, send the invite to the top team off the list. No time is wasted.
I think what is really bothering me right now isn’t that it’s random. It’s that there are 450 teams on the waitlist, but ironically 3 teams from the same school just happened to randomly be chosen for invites??? It could happen, but it just seems off.
Correct me if I’m wrong but I believe stuff like this:
happens because they prioritize picking teams off the waitlist who are most likely to be able to go and fill up the spots. Because of this, they try to pick sister teams of qualified teams because they are more likely to be able to go then a team from an org with no qualified teams. As an example, my org has 3 teams, and my team qualified but the other two didn’t. They both recently got in through the waitlist, and my guess is that because we are going they think that our sister teams will also be able to go.
However, I do agree that more objective metrics should be used for the waitlist, it’s unfair that teams who are very passionate about robotics and put in a ton of work don’t qualify because of being in a region with few spots, then don’t get waitlisted due to random chance. It would probably work better if instead of missed worlds spots all going to the waitlist, they just get added on to the “top ten unqualified teams” qualification method, then only the very last few spots which need to be filled last minute are picked based on availability.
That makes sense, but wouldn’t explain why our team didn’t get an invite. We have a middle school & an elementary team that both qualified at state and are going,
Something I’d like to add here. From my region (Utah) We’ve had two vrc teams qualify off of the waitlist, and a couple of viq teams. Both the vrc and viq teams ended up getting their spots in order of their skills placement. HOWEVER, this was not overall state skills ranking, but rather their skills ranking at the state competition.
Both the vrc teams came from different organizations that are already sending multiple other teams to worlds.
Our team definitely is on the waitlist.
A team 80 pts less than ours in skills got picked in our region. And I’m pretty sure they are not special in terms of design, innovation, or even community out outreach, or DUI.