Greetings to all teams. I created this forum to ask how can we request a spot for Vex Worlds 2017 because our team won the LatinAmerican Championship(HS division) celebrated in Puerto Rico, but we don’t have the opportunity to go to worlds because the only spot that there is was through excellence. Our mentor listed us in the waiting list, but is there anyway we can ask for a merit invite? Thanks in advance.
@Team_2297A
I don’t think that this should have been posted under Tech Support, or on the forum at all… Its really not the place for it.
As for special invites. I don’t know if that has ever happened before, but there are always exceptions.
@Maverick im sorry jajaja, i don’t have a lot of experience on the forum so i didn’t knew where to post this question. i just want RECF to know our situation to see if they can help us.
Try asking your recf representative
Wow only 1 spot? PR is a very competitive region. I feel like more should be done to help high density competitive teams in less populated regions qualify for the championship.
Have you tried running skills at all?
@phantom285A PR has 5 spots, but we were assigned to the división that only had one spot. We did run skills, but our robot was made for competition, not skills, and the skills only competition was 6 days after the latinamerican championship, so we couldn’t change our robot and we made 77 points.
We had a long and heated discussion about this a few weeks ago: Vex Worlds Qualification Fairness - VRC - VEX Forum In short, there are differing opinions on how to handle this.
I think the difference between regions like Cali and Texas that were discussed in that thread and PR is that PR has an incredibly small population relatively. The # of teams there is smaller, which is what is assumed to be the metric that the REC uses to award spots in regions. I have personally been to and worked with teams in PR and I have to argue that PR is easily just as difficult as perhaps Norcal and even south texas nowadays. Only awarding 5 spots to a region like this is a whole other level of unfair than whats being discussed in those threads. Whereas in Texas and Cali qualification, although coming up a little bit short on the total number of teams deserving to qualify, is still a mostly fair an accomplishable task. But in PR, 5 qualification spots induces randomness and deserving teams are regularly denied worlds tickets.
I’m still unsure about what I would if I had the power to fix this, but I’ve settled on something like a national competition. Essentially, there can be a fairly brief and “cheap” tournament somewhere in Central US, where it’s just like a state comp, but making it to QF qualifies you for worlds. And theres a catch, only teams who haven’t qualified for worlds can attend, so your state would send the top teams from your region that didn’t already get in.
Maybe you should have gone to the Tianjin International Starstruck Competition? Tianjin International Starstruck Competition : Robot Events
They made the top 50 skills teams qualify for good teams in a small but competitive region. Focus on skills at Regionals. I think the top 50 nonqualified teams should go to worlds, really making it the top 75 or so.
Absolutely agree with that one. It’s stupid that worlds qualified teams essentially kick out teams from the top 50 possible advancement spots. Anyone qualified should be removed from the skills advancement list just like it is at the state level of advancement. We need a top 50 skills list and a top 50 advancement list otherwise every year there’s this variable number of skills slots for invites. Especially now its combined skills
Has anyone done an analysis on who in the top 50 skills was already qualified by another means? How many actually advanced to worlds by skills this season?
Last Friday I did an analysis to find which High School teams in the top 50 were not yet registered. Given that, it isn’t a definitive list. But at the time I did the analysis (early afternoon on March 17) 6135K had not received a Worlds invite. I take that to mean other teams had not as well.
There were 10 high school teams on the list:
13 8059F
14 40B
15 8059A
19 8059B
26 2131X
32 3946C
35 8059X
37 2131W
39 6135K
41 8059Z
The first number is their rank. Note that I didn’t include the middle school teams. There were 10 Middle School teams in the top 50. Based on their regions, it is likely that most of them are getting in to Worlds based on skills.
40B is registered now, not sure about the others I haven’t looked
all 8059 teams are registered this week 
Great! I assume middle school teams 8065 and 8066 are registered as well.
Unfortunately, I don’t think the situation in PR is really that different from most other regions. Most of the regions, states, provinces, and countries listed here have only a small amount of spots. For example, Singapore has roughly the same population and number of teams (and also very “difficult” competition). But Singapore was only allocated 4 spots (though I congratulate the large amount of teams in the top 50 skills :)).
Yup… and the 8068 teams as well. It will be a big pre-world bash in EC3 this year
It is actually 1 HS + 3 MS… pretty pathetic actually.
But guess we have give up whining about it.
PS… “difficult” as in… really difficult or not difficult? 
For people who don’t know, PR has 2 divisions per HS/MS level. I disagree with this set up because it limits a team’s chance of qualyfying to Worlds such as @Team_2297A which was a high calibre team with solid chances of qualfying through the division with 4 spots.
“Difficult” means really difficult, in my opinion (since people have different ideas of what “difficulty” means). 