Re: (Seemingly) Irrational alliance selection decisions?
 

My fault, I should've better paid attention to your signature. Out of curiosity, how did y'all do a 180 after rank 50 in NYC to rank 1 in LI so quickly? (I didn't watch SBPLI that year :P)

Re: (Seemingly) Irrational alliance selection decisions?
 

I think a combination of things helped.
Modified the shooter a bit, but more being confident in our own strategy.
When we went into eliminations for NYC we used our strategies which worked well in our favor. We continued on the trend through SBPLI.
The last couple years, the teams I have been on haven't had the best robots for sure. But it's not always about having the best bot as it is playing your alliance effectively.

It helped true the next year as rookies we used our alliance to the most of its potential and finished second, while being a new team with no experience and being a defensive bot.

Re: (Seemingly) Irrational alliance selection decisions?
 

I'll be a bit blunt here- 5030 did not "finish second" at TVR 2014, you seeded second. And while it's true that playing defense was probably one of the things your robot did better, that was only because it completely lacked scoring capabilities.

I'd argue that your seeding second was more due to consistently being paired with teams like 1126, 3015, 2228, 1511, 3003, 870, 3044, 20, 4203, and 174 more than it was due to your tremendous strategic chops. Being unable to possess a ball in 2014 made most strategies other than defense difficult, and put elimination alliances at a major disadvantage - being unable to complete three assist cycles.

5030 the next two years was far better, and while your robots failed to look like beautiful powdercoated creations, they did have tremendous value when playing to your strengths.

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On the topic of irrational alliance selections, I'd argue that alliance selections are far more complicated than most people think, and that some teams might be looking at risk/reward, different strategies, and perhaps pick irrationally without thinking about how to actually win the event sometimes.

Re: (Seemingly) Irrational alliance selection decisions?
 

On Newton at Worlds in 2015, I was leading my team's (2877) scouting. Everything went well, and we had a fairly comprehensive list for both landfill and feeder station robots for our driver to pick in alliance selection if we wound up an alliance captain. Sure enough, we did captain alliance, and while our first pick went smoothly (3467, a feeder station robot), our driver got mixed up on the second pick and chose 175, also a feeder station robot when the pick list should have had us picking 3539, a landfill robot. We also had a feeder station robot, so our final alliance wound up being three feeder station robots scrambling for two feeder stations, which quickly ended any chances for us to make it out of quarter finals.

Ever since, our scouting captain has been the one to make alliance selections.

Re: (Seemingly) Irrational alliance selection decisions?
 

This situation is what whiteboards were made for. Been using one since the beginning of 2013 and never looked back. That way your entire scouting team can discuss and determine each pick, not just one person.

Re: (Seemingly) Irrational alliance selection decisions?
 

Sadly whiteboards don't always work as intended.

Looking at you 67 & 1310 at IRI in 2013 when a "3467" whiteboard turned into "3476" on the field. We still love you guys! :)

I agree that to prevent bad picks the best solution is to have a competent scout on the field who knows the capabilities of the robots attending, knows the strengths/weaknesses of your machine, and knows what robot types you need to pick to execute your elimination strategy(s). Like Chris said a good second option is to have a good representative on the field with some information and a "decision team" which includes a group of people who've been going over the data and watching the teams.

This year we always sent our captain out with a list of 24-26 robots ranked in the order we'd pick them as well as using a whiteboard with cellphones as a backup. To have a full list prepared for our captain meant scouting ended at the close of day one qualifications. This gave us plenty of time to make our picklists without staying up late the night before and we used the final qualification rounds to observe the machines we had in our top 24 to determine final rank. Sometimes machines were taken off the list or others added on seeing them improve on the second day.

It also helps not to overthink your second pick by coming up with one or two must have items for your third pick and consider "bonus" items that would be nice to have but not necessary especially if they haven't been consistent. This year we saw that most alliances we would end up on or first round selections we would make left us needing a third robot to cross a more specialized defense if we wanted to get a full 30 point autonomous. This meant our first sort of third picks was only machines who had demonstrated they could cross the Ramparts in autonomous with moderate consistency as our data also included attempts. With that list in mind we added in if they could cross the CDF or Portcullis in teleop as it wasn't our strongest defenses to cross and typically wouldn't be the same for most of our potential partners. Then we added in balls scored in teleop in the low goals as another item to add to our list.

That was typically how we picked a third robot we felt would mesh well with our alliance and received three amazing robots: 6161, 6153, 6969, as well as our Boston backup 5563 who was high up on our third pick choices.

This is a little long but just some simple advice on how teams can make better choices while sharing some methods that I've found that help take some work out of making picklists.

Re: (Seemingly) Irrational alliance selection decisions?
 

Close numbered teams make for confusion sometimes. I remember on Galileo last year when our team, 1619, was selected the guy from 1690 got up as well, thinking that was the number they had said.

One another note, I'd imagine at Minnesota Regionals that teams are very careful during alliance selection when they announce they're picking 2502 or 2052.

Re: (Seemingly) Irrational alliance selection decisions?
 

We're pretty sure we won the team spirit award one year because the judges mixed us up.

Re: (Seemingly) Irrational alliance selection decisions?
 

I've heard that 973 looks like 175.

Re: (Seemingly) Irrational alliance selection decisions?
 

Something I've been considering is a large print scoreboard (something akin to this but cheaper) to remove ambiguity and to make the print large and consistently readable.

Re: (Seemingly) Irrational alliance selection decisions?
 

Yeah alliance selection reps at the 10,000 lakes regional have to say it slowly when saying either 2502 or 2052. It's quite funny sometimes because you can notice the rep saying it slower than inviting any other team because they want to make it clear which team they are picking.

Re: (Seemingly) Irrational alliance selection decisions?
 

Yeah, it's a bit tricky.
https://youtu.be/st90uThWrlM?t=9100