We, a VRC team, would like to do skills only at a tournament in a couple of weeks. It is a home tournament, and for reasons that are too long, and irrelevant to discuss, we will not be competing at. However, we were hoping we would be able to run the skills challenge. We were informed this is not allowed.
In the rules, this is all I could find regarding this.
Appendix B (Skills Challenge Format)
The Robot Skills Challenge is an optional event. Teams who do not compete will not be penalized in the main tournament.
Teams will be guaranteed a minimum equal number of both types of Robot Skills Matches, as determined by the Event Partner.
Appendix C
The Robot Skills Champion Award is presented to the team with the highest combined Programming Skills Challenge and Driving Skills Challenge score. A team’s combined score will be determined by adding their highest Programming Skills score and their highest Driving Skills score at a single event. Teams competing in only one of the two skills challenges will receive a zero score in the challenge in which they did not participate.
Game Manual
Robots must pass inspection. Every Robot will be required to pass a full inspection before being
cleared to compete. This inspection will ensure that all robot rules and regulations are met. Initial
inspections will take place during team registration/practice time.
Obviously, we could just skip all of our matches. However, that is against T2, G1, and our morals.
Our mentor (and the EP) called our regional support manager and asked if we could do this. He said this was not possible for VRC.
My question is- Why can we not do the same thing? Is there a rule I missed that makes this not possible? Of course, nothing in the rules says we can, but the same goes for VEXU. Can we run a official skills run at a VEXU event? We obviously have to pass inspection, and we would be exempt from any awards at the tournament. We understand we would get the same amount of skills runs as everyone else does. We understand that the same process that happens for VEXU would have to happen for us(second page of the above document). We are perfectly fine with all these things. We love the skills challenge and think it is an integral part of the game and a great way to show our building, driving, and programming skills to the world.
Cuz the events would get overcrowded very quickly, the reason it’s ok for vexU is because there are alot less teams per region and alot less comps per region so it’s alot harder to run skills.
In my opinion, that’s why the RECF document for VEXU says this;
You are not obligated to say yes to having VEX U teams run skills at your VRC Event. If
you have available resources – staff and space – we would encourage you to assist the
VEX U program if asked.
It is our event. Our event partner is fine with it. We would have no problem letting other teams do the same thing, but nobody has asked. If it became an issue with overcrowding, the EP could turn down the teams.
It’s not a skills only event, it’s a normal event. Our team wishes to compete in only skills, and give up our chance at winning any awards, or qualifications. The document you just linked says this;
Robot Skills at events must follow these guidelines:
Tournaments and Leagues with 24 or more teams registered, must offer Driving and
Programming Skills Challenge Matches. Skills Challenge Matches are highly recommended for
all events.
Any event offering the Robot Skills Challenge must offer exactly three (3) Driving and three (3)
Programming Skills Challenge attempts to attending teams playing in a Tournament. If in a
league, then no more than three (3) attempts at each skill may be played in each league session.
Skills Challenge scores for all official qualifying events will be included in the World Skills
Standings on RobotEvents.com.
Skills-Only Events are not qualifying events and will not have their results uploaded to the World
Skills Standings. These are for practice only.
Would it break any rules to have @jack202020 run skills in the morning, then leave, and have one of his friends (have them ‘join’ the team) drive for the matches? As long as they had some driver practice it wouldn’t be unfair to teammates.
While RECF’s exact reasoning is not widely known (to my knowledge at least), my guess is that @224x has the right idea.
There are far fewer VEX U teams than VRC teams, so an EP would be in a minority to even receive one request for a VEX U team to run Skills. On the other hand, just fielding emails from VRC teams eager to run Skills could be quite a laborious and time-consuming process — which also risks overshadowing other, more important communications.
I’m sure some EPs could handle it, but others (especially new EPs) may be seriously bogged down by the flood of emails alone, not to mention that they may not realize or desire to simply say no. Thus, both to protect new EPs and for more consistency across events, VRC teams must register and compete at an event to run Skills at that event.
I am a 2 yr EP, so from what I have read here it seems like there used to be skills only events. As an EP I wouldn’t mind running a skills only event. I would still want to charge some sort of fee probably in the $10-$15 range. It would be a pretty easy fundraiser, and I could just have my teams there to reset the field and I could run the computer.
That being said, as an EP I would not want teams coming to my event just to run skills. The skills fields are ALWAYS busy during a tournament and teams that are competing have to find holes in their schedule to run their matches. Even if 3-4 teams were at the event to run skills, it would make it hard for the teams at the event to get their runs in.
I’ve always liked this idea. EP sets their event capacity. Teams would have to pay the full, normal fee, them only do skills.
So if I had a 30 team event, and 6 only did skills… Yes, I would happily to hammer those checks and call it a day.
VEX U is totally different logistically… Either drive for 4+ hours or just never compete. Or, volunteer at a high school event and do a couple skills in exchange.
I would LOVE to have 5 VEXU teams show up… That’s all my volunteers I need.
It should be noted that we will be volunteering at the tournament if we aren’t competing in the main tournament. Our EP/Mentor knows this, and I guarantee you he would get another skills field if he was gaining 4+ volunteers.
Skills-only events apparently had a sufficiently widespread dishonesty problem for RECF to take away the official nature of scores posted at such events. Or at least that was the community’s theory.
Skills-only events also allowed organizations without access to larger venues or other resources to host smaller, but still meaningful, events.
But this thread is starting to go off-topic, so I’ll end this discussion here.
I was at a VEX IQ tournament a few years ago with my daughter who was competing. Two teams showed up, ran skills, earned scores high enough to win skills and qualify for states, and then they left before the matches began. Since the teams were still in the match list, at that point there was nothing the EP could do. Teams who were allied with them had to run their matches alone. It angered so many teams! It was such disrespectful behavior that we tried to get them disqualified from states.
You could call their actions egregious unsportsmanlike conduct and DQ them from the whole event which would nullify their their skills scores. Honestly if someone pulled that at my event I would call the regional manager, but I think they would have my back on that.
