Brett, I am not arguing with you, but when I said the only improvement in going to a 2 circle format is that pilots get four qualifying flights is better than two qualifying flights is basically what you said without going through all of the "what ifs" and examples of bad air/good air, ballooning judges, impact of drawing rotations, load on judges, etc, etc.
Well, exactly, if you ignore those things, you just get more chances and its not much of an improvement.
But those things you ignore and call "what ifs" appeared to have time and time again been a very strong driving force in the results with the one-circle format and needed to be addressed in some way.
I will also grant that this system still asks for/demands borderline abusive work loads for the judges. I would suggest it's better than running from dawn to dusk for two straight days with them trying to tell themselves "don't balloon" every 8 minutes, but it's certainly not ideal.
I proposed that you could kill two birds with one stone by cancelling the "World Cup" event preceding every recent WC. This contest, which permits the WC competitors and judges alike to participate, amounts to a pre-judging contest since it's patently impossible for the judges to not know who did what - and of course, decide where they might have made a "mistake", to be "corrected" during the WC, consciously or not.
What you could do, instead, is get rid of the Pre-judging contest, er, "World Cup", and extend stunt qualifying over the time now available. Everyone is there anyway (because it is quite obvious that if you don't enter the World Cup, might as well not go to the WC, either), so make it count for something. That way, you do 4 hour rounds with 4 or more groups, not even bother with trying to get both groups on the same day since you are only flying against the others in your group per standard Nationals procedures. Everybody gets a good night's sleep, no one is driven to exhaustion, problem solved.
I proposed this several times, but all I heard was crickets the first time, and people sending me messages about how fun World Cups are for everyone the second time. No doubt this is true, but I again thought the purpose was to crown the world champion, not have fun-flies.
Multiple rounds and multiple circles and more of them indeed start to minimize the vagaries of any system we can devise as far as getting the best and fairest selection of pilots to move into a finals process, whatever format that finals series has.
Certainly agreed there, and I argued long and hard to at least permit if not require MORE than two circles, and various international experts had a hissy fit over it. The compromise was two, which is better than one, but not nearly as good as four. I suggested all the superior methods and no one was willing to go along. If I was the Dictator of the World, it would be fixed, but people made a good-faith effort and this is what we wound up with.
Recall that these are the same people who wanted to run without K-factors as "an experiment" despite the 50+ years of experience and them not having been present in the rules that they ripped off from the AMA in the first place. And then considered such an "experiment" too risky to actually try!
If you want to try again, I will certainly back you up, but no one is listening, for whatever reason. Try to fix the other issues, too, specifically the K-factors (which are taking the random luck weather and judging variations and multiplying them by 18), and the 1/2 point problem, too. We haven't had any luck with that in the past, but maybe it will be different. I can think of another solution, and one that I have some control over - go to the NATs instead.
In my opinion, the goal of any CL Stunt Championship series (National and International) is to fairly determine the best pilot and a fair and as accurate as possible ranking of all the other pilots. Taking care of the judges so they are not required to judge 40 to 50 flights a day for several days is part of that equation.
Absolutely. This brings us full circle to why Derek was so frustrated, and I have had my fill, too.
Forget for a second where it is, or what the stakes might be.
If you want the best, fairest, and most accurate results, you need the best judges. You need to put them, and the competitors, in the best and most fair conditions that can be devised.
There are a lot of very good judges around the world and it makes sense to use those best judges for your world championship.
If you want to put those judges in the best position to be fair and not demand unreasonable work and consistency, you need a multi-round format, on the order of 4 groups for the number of entrants they usually get. The purpose would be to hold the round length to than 4 hours or less, and not compare one group's scores directly to another to accommodate the high judge/low judge effect, which I contend is otherwise unfixable (and is not really a defect).
If you want the scores to be as consistent as possible, you need to have sufficient resolution in the scoring system to remove the effects of quantization errors.
If you want the competitors to get the best shake, you put them on the best possible fields and in the best possible format to show their skills and not get burned inordinately by random effects like weather that you cannot otherwise control.
At the US Nationals, we have ALL of these items addressed in some way, because everyone else from about 1949 on has had exactly the same goals you expressed above.
At the WC, we routinely have very substandard contest formats (although improved from previous examples), driving judges into abusive conditions with unreasonable expectations of consistency. The same format issues maximize the chance of the pilots being disadvantaged by the random weather variations. The scoring system is heavily quantized, then multiplies any quantization error by large gains (up to 18x) massively increasing the system "noise".
There are frequently ridiculous facilities in which world-class modelers with decades of experience end up damaging their airplane trying to fly in conditions we wouldn't accept at a Class C local contest. We have people with nearly no experience in running big-time stunt contests advocating for poor scoring systems and ridiculous format limitations, primarily because they want to hold their supposedly world-class event in a cow pasture, (or as Serge put it "a potato field"). We have contest organizers that won't properly prepare the sites, and go out of their way to prevent anyone else from fixing it, too.
We have people complaining about the really good WC sites because they are somehow "too far away" from the "world" they are supposed to be representing. We have very sharp international stunt fliers (Serge Delabarde, Peter Germann, Andy Sweetland, and many others) and organizers who recognize and try to fix these issues, to be systemically thwarted by meddling one-world bureaucrats and self-important out-of-touch graybeard committees who decide everything behind closed doors with no recourse for correcting their mistakes.
And now, we have the host country deciding NOT to include some of the best and most experienced judges, for no adequately explained reason.
So, there appears to be NO attempt to create the most objective and fair contest; in fact, it appear to be some sort of "compromise" half-assed system that doesn't consider getting the right answer as the highest priority.
That's why everybody is pissed off, and not asking or rejecting someone of Mark Overmeier's stature is just the last straw. They aren't even trying to put on the best contest, or get the most accurate results.
Brett
Topic: FAI F2B Judging (world champs) (Read 10950 times)