What I found surprising in AZ was the team that was first involved in the "fixing" had a very capable robot and a good driving skills. They did stop making agreements and scored a very respectable 166 pts in the first qual match on Sat a.m. They certainly would have made it into the elimination round (if not as a seed, then an early pick).

The price for being No. 1 seed might have been a bit higher than they thought....

Why are we calling this "FIXING"
 

You know what fixing means? Fixing means you make sure certain partner of yours loses in qualifying matches to help my ranking, and I'll pick u as my alliance partner. That's what fixing is, and I COMPLETELY agree that it is against the FIRST spirit.

But just making an agreement of leaving each other's stacks alone and competing for the rest of the boxes is not. Maybe I'm not from a 6 or 7 year old team, but I've been in this competition for long enough to realize what FIRST spirit is, I think.

Making an agreement is just a strategy that maintains the sense of uncertainty and competetiveness in the competition. And again, why would FIRST make your score your score + 2 X loser's score if they didn't want the cooperation? Making agreements is just taking that cooperation to another level.

*think about it*
at the larger regionals, and especially at nationals there is no garuntee that you will compete against every team. these agreements may occur betwen two consenting aliances. In the next match there may be one alliance that wants to "fix" the match, and another that refuses. this gives the teams in the "fixed" match a great advantage over the alliances involved in the match that was not "fixed." This is why this practice needs to be regulated (and by regulated i mean eliminated)...you are not going to come to a 100% consensus that this practice should continue, so as long as it does some teams will have a large advantage over others. this is why it should cease.

One match at UTC ended in a tie (fairly, I presume, I was a volunteer onstage all day, I didn't hear anything otherwise) and I guess the scoring is the same- two times the loosers score plus your own score... in the event of a tie, double the "loosers" score, and add your own score- both teams end up with 3 times their score in QP's... that may encourage some teams to try to work something out, but I do believe it discourages the spirit of what FIRST stands for: a fair and even competition in which the best robots can win.

agreements aren't necessarily bad (theres too much black and white going on here without enough grey...)

when we found that other teams were doing it we decided we should do as well because if we cant beat them on our own grounds well then why not go at them with their own strategy?

anyhow, one deal that was made was when one of the alliances only had one robot because the other robotic team didnt have their robot functioning (something broke was what i heard).
so when they and we realized we could take advantage of this situation we came to a compromise which was, since they knew they couldn't get many point on a two to one match, they decided that getting as many points as possible would be great while the two robot alliance could enjoy a big boost in their average of points...

is this not one of the good aspects to stacking pacts?

True, this is a good thing, however, wht I am referring to is matches where both alliances have functioning robots and STILL make this pact....that is what concerns me....it would be one thing if it was allowed and EVERYONE did it, however, some teams efuse, giving he ones that accept an advantage

why does making an agreement to keep stacks up make the game uninteresting? I just had to play devils advocate on this one, even though I generally agree that making agreements is not really in the spirit of FIRST. I guarentee you you could make an agreement to keep stacks up in a match, and noone, not a single person in the audience would know it happened.

Cory

Re: Why are we calling this "FIXING"
 

It seems like your team is contradicting each other...?

Since you mentioned us by #, I'll try respond to the original question. We discussed this as a team and I'm going to attempt to express the results of this discussion.

First, we are a little concerned about these petitions as they may be used to shed a negative light on teams not wishing to sign them. Our team has decided not to sign any of these petitions for this reason. We don't think there should be any negative repercussions for teams who choose to enter these agreements.

Second, we have decided not to participate in any before-match agreements to leave stacks standing. I think it boils down to the fact that we like the stack building/guarding aspect of the game and want to include it in our matches. A personal analogy is that I prefer to play in, and watch football games where a team relies primarily on running the ball (maybe it's because I'm a Husker), but I don't have any hard feelings against teams who prefer to pass.

So far 5 mentors, including me, have concluded the same thing. We're having a team meeting Sunday.

How will your team feel if you win and legitimately score 186 qualifying points, and then you see 2 other teams score 322 qualifying points by making a pre-match agreement to leave 6 bin stacks at each end?

The purpose of the petition at Arizona was to get agreement between the teams there on how we were going to play the game. Although a few teams wouldn't sign it, they did stop the practice. And I would like to thank them for that. Basically I think that they could see that it was upsetting to teams who wanted to play a 2-on-2 game as originally envisoned.

The problem seems to be that it needs to be all or none, or the teams wind up playing 2 different games, with 2-on-2 teams scoring much less. If you don't mind that, I guess there is no problem. Our team worked really hard to make a competitive robot, and while we don't mind being lower in the seeds to robots and teams that were better, we didn't like the idea of that occurring because teams were making agreements to preserve each others stacks. Also quite frankly, we didn't want to play that game ourselves, where things were orchestrated between the alliances, and we predicted that it would spread to letting all 4 robots up on the ramp and eventually to sharing the bins. That sounded boring to us. I mean how much challenge is there to build a 6 stack, knock down half the bins on each side and then roll all 4 robots up on the ramp. Not much, but the score would be impressive (until everybody started getting the same score).

I find myself somewhat amazed that I didn't see any sign of opponent agreements last year.

Have a great regional.

Unfortunately, at Nationals last year, we were approached with an agreement like these ones, "You leave our ball collector alone, and we will leave yours alone."

We didn't feel this was really Graciously Professional, and politely declined.

It is often a smart thing to leave the stacks alone, but agreements to artificially inflate the score hurts everyone else, and mostly the Stackers. This seems to kind of defeat the purpose of innovative designs, when the same end can be achieved by unwarranted "cooperation."

As said in other threads, FIRST didn't like the idea of agreeing to not knock down stacks, or "Fixing" the matches.

One thing you have to ask yourself is: What if everyone did it? What if everyone took it to the extreme? I think the result would be some fairly boring matches in which no stacks got knocked over, no boxes ended up in the neutral zone, and every robot got on to the ramp. What kind of "Made for TV" competition is that? FIRST has a vision of becoming mainstream, and it won't happen if agreements are made to make it less competitive.

About the FIRST wants teams to cooperate, they want teams to help each other solve problems, or plan strategies with teammates, but they didn't intend for opponents to cooperate with each other, and thus cooperate against everyone else at the competition.


True, it may be a good idea to be able to maximize the score to not knock down stacks, and even to let robots on the ramp, but it sure isn't to have everyone eliminating possibilities for matches just because they won't help the score.

*confused* I know about FIRST addressing fixing the match to get a tie
link

but where does FIRST address not liking the idea of agreeing to knock down stacks?

Thanks for the feedback. I guess we lucked out last year. No one approached us at all. In fact no one approached us this year in Arizona either.

I agree.

I wish you were coming to S. Calif. but maybe we will see you and your team in Houston, and we can work on keeping the competition a 2-on-2 game as per the kickoff.

I would like to apologize to those teams mentioned by number in this thread. I never meant to "call you out" I made an assumption based on my knowledge of FIRST and those particular teams. I only wished to acknowledge teams that (from my individual experience) believed in and follows he message of FIRST. If it is causing you or your team any trouble let me know and I will delete this thread.

Again, I would like to reiterate my original disclaimer

*This tread was started by a single team members. the views presented by this member are those of a single person and do not necessarily reflect the views of team 66 as a whole*