FIRST Robotics Competition Blog

District Points for Qualification Rounds

Hello teams, hope everyone had a great Kickoff! We'll have more to say about Kickoff in a later blog, but last night I got in an email from Ian Curtis, Mentor from Team 1778, Chill Out, that I wanted to respond to quickly.

Ian very politely told me his team strategizes around the goal of making it to their District Championship (hope I'm not letting the cat out of the bag here, Ian!) and it would be really helpful for us to publish that Section 7 of the 2016 Administrative Manual as soon as we can so all District teams can see what's up, especially with those District Points for Qualifying Rounds, which last year we had to change around compared to the prior year as that game was not based on Win-Loss-Tie.

Good point, Ian. While we're still not quite ready to publish Section 7 of the Administrative Manual, I can tell you what's going on with the points for those Qualifying Rounds. They are staying exactly the same as they were last year, using Danny's Magic Formula. See Section 7 of the 2015 Administrative Manual, which you can find here, look for the formula most likely to make your eyes bleed, and you're there.

Why are we keeping this the same, even though FIRST STRONGHOLD used Win-Loss-Tie as one component of the ranking system? An excerpt from the (as yet unpublished) 2016 Section 7:

"Teams familiar with the points awarded for this attribute in prior years will remember that we switched away from using Win-Loss-Tie to calculate these points for the 2015 season because the game that season was not based on Win-Loss-Tie. This led to us developing a Qualification Round Performance points system focused on rank. As we considered this attribute for the 2016 game, we realized there were advantages to staying with a formula based on rank for 2016, even though the 2016 game itself includes Win-Loss-Tie as one portion of the team ranking method. Using only rank to calculate Qualification Round Performance points ensures all intended elements of the team ranking method designed into the game are taken into consideration, and helps ensure District teams are ‘playing the same game’ as Regional teams."

FIRST STRONGHOLD Logo for Real

I don't know if the community has yet picked up on it, but the logo we used at the end of the 2016 Teaser was not the 'real' FIRST STRONGHOLD logo. While we had the real logo at the time the teaser was made, we didn't want to include it. Why? Because we're absolutely determined to be jerks. No, no, no! Because the real logo, which you saw at the end of the game animation yesterday, included a tower image with very obvious goal openings, and we want to keep at least some of this game a secret.

You can find the real logo here at the bottom of the page.

More soon!

Frank