FIRST Robotics Competition Blog

Yesterday, I noted we had an issue with first-round event assignments, in which approximately 5% of teams were not assigned the correct event. I apologize again for this.

The good news is that today we are contacting teams that were negatively affected by our error to see if they want to move into the more preferred event they should have been assigned to. We need to do some juggling to make this happen, but we are confident we can do so. These teams will have until 5 PM Eastern Time Monday, October 2, to let us know if they would like to move. If we don’t hear from them by that time, we will assume they are not interested in changing events. We would like to give these teams more time to respond, but right now we have a hold on unrelated event registrations while we get this sorted out. If things go as expected, we should be able to open event registrations and start processing waitlist moves Monday night or Tuesday.

I thought you might like to see some statistics on how the new preference system worked in assigning teams. Please note that these stats show how the system would have worked if the bug had not been present and teams got what they should have the first time through. With our attempt to remedy the situation team by team as described above, the actual statistics will vary somewhat from this, but I think the actuals will be close to this when the dust settles.

• 3,093 teams were registered or waitlisted for events

• 92.5% of teams, or 2,861 teams, would have been registered for their first event preference

• 4.8% of teams, or 150 teams, would have been waitlisted for their first event preference.
  • Note that all 53 teams in Israel were automatically waitlisted, because of the way that District currently handles allocation to their four district events.
  • Last year, under the first-come-first-served system, at the conclusion of the first day of Regional registration, 4.7% of teams, or 107 teams out of the 2,239 total in the system, were waitlisted.

• 2.1% of teams, or 66 teams, would have been registered for their 2^nd event preference

• Balance of registrations/waitlists would have been negligible from a % standpoint

I hope everyone has a great weekend!

Frank