CubingUSA Nationals 2017 - Fort Wayne, Indiana (July 7-9)

[aybuck37]

I think this will definitely influence registration fees if people are competing in less events, we could see even higher registration fees.

*Gasp*!! I didn't even think about that! Especially for smaller events too

 

[One Wheel]

*Gasp*!! I didn't even think about that! Especially for smaller events too

You could see this at nationals, but I suspect the opposite would be true, if there's any difference at all, for local comps. If anything there's going to be more demand for big blind because organizers and other competitors will be looking for opportunities to get qualifying times. and the times are lenient enough that they will still almost certainly fill all available slots, meaning that there is no reason for registration fees to change.

 

[aybuck37]

You could see this at nationals, but I suspect the opposite would be true, if there's any difference at all, for local comps. If anything there's going to be more demand for big blind because organizers and other competitors will be looking for opportunities to get qualifying times. and the times are lenient enough that they will still almost certainly fill all available slots, meaning that there is no reason for registration fees to change.

Ohhh so you're saying that the small events, that are usually small, won't be because they will be popular

 

[One Wheel]

Ohhh so you're saying that the small events, that are usually small, won't be because they will be popular

popular might be an overstatement, but I wouldn't be surprised if there was a bit of a shift. At least they might show up at more competitions.

 

[WACWCA]

The problem I see with that is specialization: it's likely that somebody who is really good at 3BLD would also be good at 4BLD, but not necessarily. somebody who is really good at 4BLD but doesn't practice 3BLD could be bumped by somebody who does exclusively 3BLD but thinks it would be fun to try 4BLD. everybody knows Feliks is a fantastic cuber, does that mean he should get an automatic qualification for skewb?

20 min for 4x4 Bld isn't fast at all, and is very reasonable to achieve, if your fast at 3bld you are not automatically fast at 4bld but I would bet you can at least make the cutoff. And you wouldn't get bumped by someone who is faster at 3 Bld and not 4 Bld, because there is not limits on people per event, only people overall, so they would've signed up anyway and get to compete in all events they can.
To the skewb question, no, I just longer events that were related, like qualifying for 7x7 by doing 6x6 and 4bld by doing 3bld, because the skills transfer over a lot. If you are good at 3x3, no you don't automatically qualify for things like clock or pyra because they are completely different.

 

[AlexMaass]

This style of qualification is something we wanted to do, but we were informed by the WRC that this is not allowable by the current regulations.

• Z3) The organisation team may select competitors who directly qualify for certain rounds of certain events based on the results of specific previous competitions.

I don't see exactly why it would not be allowed, it says based on results on specific previous competitions, it doesn't say you have to base on the same event.

Also I really think this style should be allowed or implemented in a future version of the regulations if they think the regulations currently does not allow for it. Lets say the 2x2 qualification was sub 20 average, I think it would be fair to allow a cuber who has a sub 20 3x3 average be able to compete in 2x2 (the competition they went to might've not had 2x2), as they have solved the corners of the 3x3 (equivalent to a 2x2) plus 12 edge pieces and 6 centers in less than 20 seconds, I believe we can safely assume if you're sub 20 on 3x3 you are sub 20 on 2x2 as well. Could also be implemented for big cubes.

No one is saying it's perfect, but it is better than the alternative. For some people, yes, they will have to travel or not compete in that event (or, you know, put in the work to host your own comp) but that's way better than the alternative.

I'm guessing you are kind of right, but I believe that we are capable of the alternative (expanding the capacity of competitions).

 

[biscuit]

I'm guessing you are kind of right, but I believe that we are capable of the alternative (expanding the capacity of competitions).

To a point, but it'll have to happen eventually, so experimenting with it to find the best way sounds better than having to implement it when we have no other options. I haven't been to a Nats, so I don't know how much the staff can handle, but that may be a bigger concern then venue size.

Plus I think qualifications are a good thing for something called nationals. It makes it a more serious competition. I think Nats and Worlds should be a different atmosphere from most competitions. Other comps should not be focused on the competing for most people, but I think Nats and worlds should be more focused on the competition. Maybe that's just me though.

 

[Kit Clement]

• Z3) The organisation team may select competitors who directly qualify for certain rounds of certain events based on the results of specific previous competitions.

I don't see exactly why it would not be allowed, it says based on results on specific previous competitions, it doesn't say you have to base on the same event.

Also I really think this style should be allowed or implemented in a future version of the regulations if they think the regulations currently does not allow for it.

That's how I interpreted it as well. I agree though that this should change.

 

[aybuck37]

That's how I interpreted it as well. I agree though that this should change.

Wait that just means that organizers can have qualifying times right?

 

[Joel2274]

Well...I'll be flying to Paris from the US so I would kinda like to be able to compete in more than 4 events. I don't really agree with the qualification times at all. Nor do I see why they did it. To save space for faster people to be able to attend would be a reason for debate, and comps are always fun being able to hang out with other cubers anyway, but I would just rather not have to go to a previous comp just to go to nats. If I have to pay to get in, I think I should be able to compete in whatever I want, even at additional costs.

 

[aybuck37]

Well...I'll be flying to Paris from the US =

Wait but US nationals is the United States. The world championships is there. I'm not sure if world's will have cutoffs? Maybe?

 

[AlexMaass]

I have heard worlds will have qualifications in some events (not 100% confirmed), I'll ask Ron for more details.

 

[Heart_Johnson]

Kinda disappointed that I can't even compete in 4bld/5bld because my only attempts have been dnf's from a total of two competitions ever :/ Would be nice if the dnf times were accounted into the cutoffs

 

[AlexMaass]

Kinda disappointed that I can't even compete in 4bld/5bld because my only attempts have been dnf's from a total of two competitions ever :/ Would be nice if the dnf times were accounted into the cutoffs

if that was the case then we would all just hold 5bld with 1 second cutoffs just so people could qualify in it for nats

 

[One Wheel]

if that was the case then we would all just hold 5bld with 1 second cutoffs just so people could qualify in it for nats

Heart_Johnson's Is a valid complaint, just an unfortunate consequence. holding 5bld with 1 second cutoffs won't help anything.

 

[Joel2274]

Wait but US nationals is the United States. The world championships is there. I'm not sure if world's will have cutoffs? Maybe?

Nevermind I was talking about worlds in Paris.

 

[AlexMaass]

Heart_Johnson's Is a valid complaint, just an unfortunate consequence. holding 5bld with 1 second cutoffs won't help anything.

if a DNF was required to qualify, then yes, 5BLD with 1 second cutoffs would help

 

[One Wheel]

if a DNF was required to qualify, then yes, 5BLD with 1 second cutoffs would help

It would make it easier to qualify, but it wouldn't do anything to help address the problem of more people wanting to compete than there is room for, and it makes a mockery of the event, which if you take seriously is probably the coolest WCA event. The problem I am talking about is not the fact that there are qualification times, but the problem that qualification times are intended to address.

 

[AlexMaass]

Oh yeah, in 2008 or something, they used this system, why was it used then and why was it ditched at that time?

 

[Tim Reynolds]

Hey folks,

Thanks for all the interest. I want to give some background on the current situation and why we have qualification times.

This year we had a competitor limit of 600 competitors, which would have been the largest WCA competition ever at the time. Registration was only open for a month before we filled up, and in another 1.5 months we had 200 competitors on the waiting list, which was way more than we could accommodate. If we didn't have a competitor limit, it's likely we'd have 1200-1500 competitors in 2017. There are a number of reasons we can't take that many people. To name some of them:

-Venues that large tend to be very expensive. We're near the limit of the amount of space that hotels have. Convention centers are typically much more expensive.
-Organizing a team of 77 staff members is challenging and adds a lot of work. Organizing a team of 200 staff members would be much harder.
-One of the difficult parts of Nationals has always been keeping the N stages in sync. If one stage gets behind, then either the entire competition gets behind, or you get called for two events at once. Increasing N makes this harder.
-We're still figuring out how to make our planning scale. I still assign competitors to heats on paper and using a big spreadsheet. All the organizers have full-time jobs.

We will be increasing the competitor limit in 2017, and I hope we'll increase the competitor limit in 2018 as well. However, regardless of whether we have qualifying times, there will likely be ~500 competitors who want to compete at Nationals who can't. The question then is how to figure out which 500 competitors not to accept.

I don't think that first-come, first-serve is the right way to go moving forward. This year registration filled up in a month. If it filled up in a week, or 3 days, a possible event winner might miss registration, and that is something we definitely want to avoid. Since this is the national championships, we want to ensure that the top competitors are able to compete. There are many more local competitions now than there were in the past, so we're hopeful that everyone who wants to be able to attend competitions will be able to do so, even if they can't compete at Nationals. We'll also continue to work to make sure that happens.

My hope is that we'll be able to increase the number of competitors we're able to accept every year, although I doubt we'll be able to grow at the same rate that our community is growing. We get better at this every year, but we need to make sure that we're still able to hold a good competition.

There's a lot of stuff in this thread and unfortunately I don't have time to reply to everything right now. To quickly reply to Alex's question about qualifying times in the past: we had qualifying times in 2007 - 2009, and qualification rounds for people who weren't qualified. This counted as one of the rounds in that event and took up a lot of time in the competition. In 2010 we realized we had time to let everyone compete in round 1. Nationals is a very different competition now than it was then. We only had 135 competitors in 2009, the last year we had qualifying times. We've had 16 local competitions in the US this year with at least that many people. The staff competition in 2017 might have almost this many people.

Thanks,
Tim