Re: "Random" match Schedules
 

According to what Dave just told us, the results were exactly what they were designed to be. No amount of testing against the design will reveal problems with the design itself. [edit]The problem was that the design didn't match the specification, or perhaps there was never a formal specification to begin with.[/edit]

I too admit confusion, however. If you all will forgive a bit of rumor/hearsay: I heard at St. Louis from several people that the exact same issue was noticed and complained about in pre-kickoff tests, and that the complaints were dismissed because "That's the way FIRST wants it to be." Obviously the miscommunication occurred at a fundamental level.

Re: "Random" match Schedules
 

Alan's conclusion matches what we (FTA, Lead Scorekeeper, and event staff in St. Louis) were told on Thursday night when we contacted FIRST to ask why the "perpetual opponent" schedule kept coming up no matter what we tried to change it.

Dave has told us this will be fixed for Week 2. That's good enough for me. :)

Re: "Random" match Schedules
 

Well, I started this whole thread... Now that we all have the answer we were looking for, maybe I can nudge this in a different direction.

(Moderators, please let me know if I should make this a new thread...)

If teams were constantly playing with/against the same alliances, how come the rankings stayed at it's typical distribution? Why didn't every team either go 8-0 or 0-8? Did this have to do with alliances switching up the strategy? Was it due to mechanical/electrical problems or improvements? Driver practice and improvement over the course of the regional?

I'm looking for specific answers from only the teams and drive/strategy teams that competed last weekend. If you don't have first hand knowledge of strategy sessions, driver improvements, or robot problems/improvements, please don't add what you "think" happened. (Sorry to be so blunt about this...)

Thanks,

BEN

Re: "Random" match Schedules
 

Well, the whole alliance was never the same, just one team over and over again. So if one team was dominant over their "continual partner", they tended to end up on the opposite sides of the rankings, but this wasn't an assurance that the same thing would happen every match. In our case, we went 5-2-1 vs 192, and a lot of how the matches played out had to do with our alliance partners, not just 114 vs 192 battling it out solo on the field. So I think in a way FIRST got a little lucky that the matches weren't so lopsided, but I do feel really bad for the teams that played against the same dominant team every match. I would freak out if I knew we had to play someone like the Poofs every qualifier :ahh:

I'm glad that FIRST realizes the issue and I hope we will see significant improvements in the weeks to come.

Mike C.

Re: "Random" match Schedules
 

Team 488 played against team 492 every match from the beginning of thursday to the end of qualifiers on Saturday. We ended up winning most of our matches, but not all because sure enough, two robots do not decide the outcome of a 3v3 match. Not only that, but if a team gets the opportunity to play against the same alliance every single match they will be forced to come up with some unique and creative strategies to change the outcome.

We lost a match due to the (at the time) brand new tactic of deploying a ramp in the alley beside the rack to completely prevent us from getting back to our home zone to deploy and lift. This definitely caught us off guard. After this strategy started popping up and with how powerful lifting points became more and more teams started playing heavy defense. This is what lead to our two low points ties at the end of qualifiers and having both 1540 and 948 (two of the best pnw ringers) both play defense against us nearly the entire time during two of our elimination matches.

Re: "Random" match Schedules
 

lol, pretty funny, i wish

thank you dave, and yes, the update has been released, it is avalable on the website. i just saw it like 10 min ago

second of all, thank you FIRST for fixing a problem so quickly, hopefully everything turns out better for all of us later this week

Re: "Random" match Schedules
 

This coming week should go off without a hitch, they will be implimenting an entirely new algorithm. Evidently the current one was written to such constraints that with any drastic modification it could break other things in the process. If this is all people have to point out about the first week of regionals, then I believe we're in best shape to start a season in almost 4 or 5 years. The only other issue that I noticed at the event that I attended was that the iPaq's that were used for automated scoring had a tendency to either drop their network connection or IIS would need to be restarted. The whole process took a round or two to get fixed, but was seemless to the audience.

Re: "Random" match Schedules
 

Here, here! Again as many people have said, THANK YOU DAVE FOR THE CLARIFICATION OF WHAT'S GOING ON! And I'm just happy it'll be fixed! :)

Re: "Random" match Schedules
 

Well, our team has been tracking this and other threads like it for a while now. We'll just have to wait and see what comes up at the NY Regional. Hope to see some of you there.

Re: "Random" match Schedules
 

yeah it was pretty disappointing to see that trend happening in the practice matches today but we talked to some of the higher ups and their working on solving the problem before qualifiers tomorrow at Bayou.

Re: "Random" match Schedules
 

one of our mentors was a volunteer (he was the announcer) at the vcu regional. he said there was a glich in the program. they were trying to pair a veteran team with a middle team with a rookie team. they messed up somewhere in the middle. and at the crossover point of the verteran/middle teams, they were paired together in every match.

Re: "Random" match Schedules
 

Looks like the event staff will be able to use one of two different algorithms to set matches up. One is the perpetual opponent and the other the random opponent. See this post in the Q and A.

http://forums.usfirst.org/showthread.php?t=6163

For further details. A big thank you to FIRST for giving us a choice! Hopefully your individual event staffers will use random.

Re: "Random" match Schedules
 

Thank you FIRST! :D

Now if only we can strike a truce over the band saw and drill press fiasco, I will be completely relieved. ;)

Re: "Random" match Schedules
 

Looks like Pittsburgh successfully chose the "random" match generation mode, rather than "perpetual opponent".

Looking at two "senior" teams 48 and 49 and their "senior" opponents in matches so far: (as of about noon Eastern time)

48: 49, 158, 395, 291

49: 48, 117, 247, 123

Re: "Random" match Schedules
 

In my opinion pittsburgh is hardly random. My team was almost always on the field at the sametime as 117 and 337. Most of the time we were on their alliance. We also seemed to play agianst the same few robots over and over agian.