We were offered a collusion for one of our matches, I took the Memo from FIRST, handed it to their driver and said, "We'll play our game, you play yours, we'll see what happens"

From what I saw on TV, every match appeared clean and well fought out.

we are proud to say that, as the number 1 seed in Galileo, we did not collude at any time. After playing at West Michigan and Midwest we ironed out a very good strategy which we used for about 3/4 of our matches: we defend the stacks, and our partner controls the bins. This kind of became our specialty, even though some of the more maneuverable and faster bots could and did get around us.

Oh yeah, we got the memo from woody too. It basically stated that everyone should play the same game, and colluding was not keeping things fair for all teams.

Cahoots!!!
 

Yeah, I believe in my heart that it was going on in the Gallileo Div. because our alliance in one of the matches told us that we should leave the stacks standing, like they knew if they talked us into it then the other team that we were against would pick them for the finals. I checked the other teams standings and sure enough they were in 4th place at that time. So just before the match I told the coach of the other team to defend our stack as in most play and they never came over to our side of the field to attempt to defend, we lost that match. And if they had played on our side I believe we could have seeded high up.
Our first match of Fri. we showed up on the field and our alliance partners didn't. We played our game as we had planned and won against 2 robots, it was a low scoring event 17QP's but we still won. Later on we were involved in a match that had no collusion what so ever and scored the highest QP's in Gallileo of 272 points. And we did it with one of the same team robots that we had beat in the first round when it was 2 bots on our one. Yeah I hope there will be a game next year that doesn't lend the opportunity to this type of "PREPLANNING" See ya all next year...

Interesting - because Buzz and Techno Ticks won the Granite State regional at NH together and the Techno Ticks and Buzz were in the top 2 alliances at the finals at the UTC Regional in CT.

Teams being picked does not dictate they had colluded efforts anywhere.

Buzz and the Ticks won a regional, therefore they become prime picking material for the top 8 seeds. Nothing surprising about them being picked.

We were at the Nationals, but I never saw the Memo from FIRST. After all the discussion in this forum, I am dying to see it.

Does anyone have a copy?

Can you post the text here or mail me one or ...

I think that a minimum awarded score would have squelched the collusions. But i know a team that offered collusions at least one time in the Newton division.

A minimum score of 100 or 150 for the winning alliance would have made teams like the 17 point winners feel a little better about taking on 2 teams single handed, and provide a bit more action in the qualifiers.

Then again i totally hated how this year was scored, it favored luck more than anything... and that's exactly how we lost. No luck.

Scoring
 

I feel similarly. The way things were scored didn't benefit our teams. I don't mean this in an offensive way, but I saw teams out one of our regionals that seeded in the top 8 that weren't very strong, nor in my opinion, very good either.

It really is sad for me to see in my eyes, because every year I've participated on FIRST, the robots who didn't do well never got anywhere. Our team was always one of those robots. This year we built an amazing robot which I am proud to have been part of, but because the way scoring worked, we still didn't do well. :(

Yes, thanks John for the help :D

Josh's reaction was classic...I almost cracked up right then and there...

Chris and Shannon wanted to see it too, but I guess you were too busy to come back to the pit so we could all laugh :D

Josh: remember what my board said after you figured out it was a joke? That was my opinion of collusion :cool:

:ahh: --> this is what you jtosh looked like when D.J. asked you to collude!

...which is why we picked them. How is that in any way collusion?

These two teams are as noble as any in FIRST...one is a national Chairman's winner, the other a regional Chairman's winner. They win through skill and luck, the way it is supposed to be. And if you saw their robots, you'd understand why they did so well.

Sorry, I misread "qualifying match partners" from your first post thinking that you meant your partners for the finals. I was just so shocked and I jumped to conclusions.

wait wasn't it blank except for your number and my number and my alliances number? Thats all i remeber...

Ohh and i remeber that your board is cooler then mine so once again i feel liek the technokats are better then us:) Hehe...until we tip you!:yikes:


_edit_

That isn't collusion at all, and people shouldn't assume that it is.

There have been multiple instances every year of competition where a bot might be excellent in both strategy and gameplay, and get picked (or win) several regionals. In 2001 Beatty won both the West Mich Regional and the MMR, and then won the national title. That doesn't mean that they colluded... it just means that they had a good bot and people knew it.