Our team is currently debating whether to do LRT or LRS for IQ worlds. As of right now, LRS is about a 10 to 1 registration rate in the first week and would have to assume the trend will be close going forward. While we are good in both, we were favoring LRT. Our concern about having to register so early (we lose our qualification on 3/31) is that if registration for LRT stays pretty low, REC might open it up to whomever wants to pay the $500 to get in, thus watering down the skill level in the LRT at Worlds and increasing the probably of constant lower skill level of Alliances. Worlds LRT should be the 100 teams that earned it vs 200 teams that half of them probably shouldn’t be there because the REC needed to make some more money and started inviting anybody with a pulse off the skills list.
I can’t be the only coach concerned about this scenario happening.
Sincerely,
Concerned
P.S. - I would love if Dan or someone from the REC got tagged to respond.
This is a matter of speculation but i would imagine if there is truly a lack of teams, theyll allow teams who signed up for LRS, and went on waitlist for LRT, to compete in both. I might be wrong, but that would be my best guess!
I think you’re forgetting that the purpose of LRT worlds is not to be a high-tier, selective event, but to give teams a chance to compete at a global scale in a season that they normally wouldn’t be able to do so. So while the prospect of a less than normal competitivity for worlds might not sound fun, it certainly does give a lot more teams the chance to compete at some form of worlds this season. Also I don’t know how the competition structure for iq works, but I’m pretty sure you guys have some form of elimination system, so by the end of the event the competitivity of teams should be getting more concentrated. (again, no idea how vexiq competition structure works so someone correct me if I’m wrong)
The thing is that it’s not like the “best” teams are qualifying early and other teams will qualify later. Our regional is in about a month and if LRS is closed off by then, then all the teams will go to a LRT, the good and the bad.
Also just a quick note… They have 800 spots for worlds this year. The 800th team on the middle school skills list… is currently at 32. There are only 1364 teams that have done robot skills.
But every time I’ve been to WORLDS there are the best teams there and there are always a number of lower level teams as well. Many regions are not as competitive but when you represent every region then you will have a lot of ups and downs. One year one of my IQ teams got paired with a “claw bot” 4 or 5 times. That has always been the nature of WORLDS.
Don’t do either. There is no place doing skills unless you are top 10 in the worlds. I don’t know about iq but the VRC lrt has devolved into stuffing 8 balls in the center goal.
I dont believe you have read how worlds is going to work this year… Skills is broken down into many divisions based on your previous high skills score, so if you’re a mid tier team, you’ll play against other teams in your skill range. Meaning you can be a “skills world champion” by beating teams in your skill range.
I am aware that this is how skills works. Again, I am unfamiliar with how vex iq works so I will be using VRC as an example.
My teams current official high score is around 165. Let’s say vex draws the skills division cut off at 166. I will be one of the best teams in the division and stand a really good shot at winning an award. Let’s say they make the cut off at 164 for a division. It is very unlikely that I will win an award then. It is a stupid system that can result in teams with lower scores winning awards over objectively better team just because they got lucky.
That’s the exact point right there that I’m worried about, that they (REC) will let just about anyone in to meet a sales quota of just filling the event. No offense to the teams ranked down there, but if you didn’t win an award to get in, I don’t think I would want the REC to invite whomever just to try and get as many teams, thus diluting the LRT competition. I get there will be teams there that might not be that great, but they won an award to get in.
I get the feeling as more weeks go on and teams qualify from their states, that LRS will start to fill up faster and LRT not so much, thus we get stuck with REC turning into telemarketers and trying to sell spots for LRT to any team possible.
@CautionTape - what are you guys registering for? That way we can do the opposite, hahaha
Would you rather play down and win an award or play up, challenge yourself and not win? Sounds like the award is the important part to you rather than pitching your skills against teams that are “better” than you.
You aren’t even really competing against other teams. I have gone to a virtual skills event. I didn’t watch any of the other teams runs. If I want to “compete” against better teams and “challenge” myself I could just go up against any of the 252 skills runs on YouTube.
In terms of that particular event, then you are competing against these teams since you can only be measured against these teams for an award if you are participating in the event. My question about playing up or playing down was genuine, but I totally get that live remote events are not for everyone.
I have gone to a few remote skills events now (4), and I can say that this isn’t the case (kind of), at least for me. It is more of a “just trying to better yourself as a driver and robot” than a normal competition, where a normal one would be head to head. I am very interested to see how this new format for worlds works out. I am guessing that the new format will lead to more teams watching more skills runs, as there will be a much larger gap in between runs.
@9MotorGang has a good point. Making Divisions might make skills harder for some people. My team’s official score is 351 and it’s in top ten in the VIQ middle school WSS but It’s unlikely that we’ll win an award at Worlds because there are so many other competitive teams in our assumed division.
Rest of the teams will decide once they qualify in April. 