VEX IQ: what is and is not calculated
A VEX IQ Teamwork match is cooperative. Two teams play together for a single score, which the API reports on both sides of the match, and there is no opponent. Every rating below — Elo, OPR, DPR, CCWM — measures a team against somebody, so none of them are computed for this program. Read as alliance play, every Teamwork match is a tie and every team's record is 0–0–N with a 0% win rate; that is why those columns are absent rather than filled with zeroes.
| Figure | What it is |
|---|---|
| Average | Mean Teamwork score across every match with a score recorded. The fairest single column to rank on, and what seeds an event. |
| High score | The team's best single match. One strong partner can produce it, so it says less on its own than the average does. |
| Total | Every point scored this season. It rewards playing more events as much as scoring well, so compare it only between teams with similar match counts. |
| Qualification rank | The event's own ranking, imported rather than derived, ordered by average score. |
Event importance below still applies, minus its field-strength term: that term is the mean Elo of the registered teams, and there is no Elo here. Those events score on level and size alone, which the level/size/strength breakdown shows as a · in the third position.
Event importance
A judgement dressed as a number. The weights are a choice, not a measurement, which is why the three parts are shown under every score as level/size/strength instead of being collapsed into one opaque figure.
| Component | Weight | What it reads |
|---|---|---|
| Level | 45% | The event's own classification from the API — World 100, National 85, Signature 75, Regional 60, State 50, Other 20 |
| Field size | 25% | Registered teams, log-scaled against a reference of 120 so the gap between 10 and 30 counts more than between 90 and 110 |
| Field strength | 30% | Mean Elo of registered teams that have one, needing at least 3 rated teams |
When field strength is unknown, the weights are renormalised over what is known rather than scoring the event as weak. Otherwise the column would measure how much data we happen to have, and every upcoming event would sink below every past one for reasons unrelated to importance. A · in the strength slot means exactly that.
Known problem with the strength term
The Elo-to-score mapping runs 1400 → 0 and 1800 → 100. Those numbers were chosen, not derived, and measuring shows they are badly calibrated.
Smaller rules worth knowing
| Number | How it works |
|---|---|
| Scoring figures | Only from matches with a score recorded. A team with none shows “—”, never 0. |
| Allies | Who a team has played Teamwork with. The partner sits on the opposite side of the stored match, because that is how the API reports a Teamwork pairing — read as alliance play, every team would appear to have no partners at all. |
| Event grade | Derived from the grades of registered teams, never from the event name — checked against known rosters, names were wrong or silent about 45% of the time. Called for a grade at 90% or more of one grade, otherwise “Blended”. |
| Match dates | Exact where the schedule has a time. Every elimination match lacks one, so those show the event's date range in italics. |
| Regions | The US is split into seven regions and everywhere else grouped by country, mirroring who a team actually competes against. The whole United States is selectable too, above its regions in the menu — its count is the sum of them, including the “Other” bucket that catches an unrecognised state. |
| Programs | VEX IQ and the other program keep separate catalogs. Team numbers are reused between them, so one table keyed by number would merge two different teams into one record. |
0 of 1114 events currently have enough rated teams for the strength term to fire at all.