YOU ARE OUT OF CONTROL! Seriously I disrupted my class from laughing!!! 
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Yes, a number of times.
On the other hand, have you been to an FRC Worlds where only award winners and the top ranked go?
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âTeams may join the FIRST Championship Open Waitlist to fill slots not consumed by Pre-Qualifying, Merit-Based Qualifying, or Priority Waitlist teams.â
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Never been to an FRC event.
So how can you argue that by allowing waitlist teams makes the event illegitimate? Youâve been there several times, whatâs your evidence to back your claim?
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Not true, There is a waitlist for FIRST Championship as well. This season its a little complex, but yes teams from the general FRC waitlist will get in.
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At the EP Summit in 2019 @DanMantz gave some great information about the move to Dallas and RECFâs goals for VEX Worlds. One of those goals is to get a certain percentage of teams each year at Worlds. The magic number, if I recall correctly, was somewhere around 7.5%. Each time VEX Worlds has moved to a larger venue is that they were getting close or falling under that magic number. Dallas should be above that number for years to come, based on their expected growth figures at that time.
This is the same reason that FIRST went to two championships a few years ago. These events are not designed to be only for the elite teams, but to give a large number of teams the opportunity to participate in the greatest event their sport offers. Competition robotics is about engaging students in a hands on activity to promote STEM education. Of all the programs, RECF get this one closer to perfect than any other out there.
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Not 100+ waitlist teams.
But still waitlist teams. Theyâve also had the longstanding veteran waitlist as well.
And still a decent amount.
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I think you also need to factor in the size of program - FRC, big iron, has fewer teams in the program compared to all the VRC. Not sure about FTC etc.
so better to compare percentages.
End of the day, Worlds is a celebration of the season and more teams you can inspire, the better from RECF mission perspective.
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Would it not matter if their was 20 divisions as long as each division was seeded by skills? Other seeding methods can be used, anything aside from RNG.
Top 60 = Masters Division
61-121 = Diamond Division
121-181 = Platinum Division
so on and so forth. In theory, anyone can still win but the highest probability goes with the highest seeded divisions as should be.
But in this, you canât place 69th. so it is bad.
This is a good idea though if they arenât already using it.
The issue would be that it punishes teams who donât follow the skills meta. The most obvious would be wallbots, but any robot thatâs designed for something other than âscore as fast as possibleâ would be unable to pair with the best scoring robots.
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Sure that absolutely makes sense that skills is only look at one aspect only.
A teamâs total ranking rubric could compose of
Skills score
Championship wins
Signature wins
Tournament wins
Strength of competitors in relationship to the above (think ELO in Chess)
If the goal is to seed equitably, it can definitely be done.
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Ahh yes, the famous â2Champsâ that didnât make anyone happy about Worlds since there wasnât a âChampionâ
They have always done the best they can with the resources ($$$) they have in the time allotted to inspire as many teams as possible.
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They did have a summer meet up between the two alliances with a Bo5 format.
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To be clear, and this is hard for competitors to understand, the RECFâs primary motivation is not to find âthe best robot allianceâ at Worldâs. The RECFâs primary motivation is to inspire and celebrate the end of the season. Their definition of âsuccessâ is much more diverse than what most highly competitive (in the sense of match-play) competitors would define âsuccessâ. This is why they prioritize judged award winners from Regionals, Skills Winners, OnLine Challenge Winners, etc. RECF is not purely a 2-v-2 Robot Competition, that just happens to be the most visible (and motivating, probably) formats.
Anyone who has different priorities is welcome to create their own event with their own titles, with their own invitation criteria, their own competition format, etc. The CREATE org has different qualifying criteria than RECFâs Worldâs, for example and VRC competitors set up their own LRT format last year that seems to have heavily influenced this yearâs LRT format.
So while I think the RECF is open to format changes, I donât see their core values (e.g. âinspiring the most amount of high schoolers to pursue STEMâ) is going to change over into something like âbeing the most competitive high school 2-v-2 robotics competitionâ anytime soon. And if it did, I think Iâd certainly re-evaluate my involvement with the program. As others have said, of the competitive robotics competitions, RECF really does seem to do the most to hit that nail on the head. Yes, they arenât perfect and their are any number of things that they do that drive us crazy (cough SG3 cough), but overall it is a fantastic program
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That is an adorable vision of how FRC champs invites teams. They invite teams whose only claim to fame is being old, even if they got last at every event in the last five years.
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It sounds like some roboteers are dis-inspired about the apparent unfairness of alliance seeding. I get the RECFâs goal, but it seems like sometimes mentors overemphasize inspiring to dismiss roboteersâ concerns. For instance, some students were unhappy about teams copying robots, and they got a few answers mentioning inspiring roboteers, meaning the teams copying robots. I can only imagine how dis-inspired the original teams that lost to the copiers would be.
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How an individual reacts to a situation is up to that individual. Is it unfair that 1 team passes directly through to Quarter Finals for MS? Yes. Given the constraints that 8 Divisions are not physically possible, has the RECF come up with a reasonably fair solution? Thatâs a matter of opinion, to which I would say âyesâ and others will say ânoâ. I would then argue that a team with a healthy competitive world-view would say, âSo what, weâll win anywayâ regardless of whether they think it fair or not.
I am sympathetic to being upset with teams showing up with âclonedâ robots that seem above a teamâs skill level. Combatting that comes back to those teamsâ mentors. What the outside world may perceive as âabove skill levelâ may actually be the result of legitimate collaboration. Thereâs a lot of trust necessary for robotics competitions and teams generally in my experience are honest and work within the spirit of the game, but there are exceptions. De-emphasizing the âwin-at-all-costâ mentality is one way to combat this. Itâs ok to be upset that you lost a match/tournament. Itâs ok to be really upset that it was to a clone of your bot. What one does after that initial gut reaction is the mark of real competitors and engineers - analyze why the other team did better and improve.
One of the great things about the VRC season, especially in comparison to FRC, is how long it is. Both of my teams built several robots this season, each improving on the last. This constant evolution and steady improvement IS the engineering and competitor mindset.
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@tabor473 At least for this year only the last few years of Chairmenâs winners are invited. None of the O&S teams got an automatic bid. Iâm assuming that will change when we go back to two events next season.
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