Weird Qualifying Rules
 

Am I the only one that thinks that the way the seeding points are added up is a little strange? If you can make more seeding points by scoring for the other team then by scoring on your old goal then I think that that screws up the game.

Example
During one of our teams matches today we scored 4 goals,just our team (something I have seen very few other teams do today). The final score in the match was 4 to 6 and there were no peneltys. After this match we went down 10 slots in the seed. If we had lost 0 to 6 we would have gone up in the seed.

Am I missing something?
Does the way the seeding is set up make sence to anyone else?

Re: Weird Qualifying Rules
 

Am I the only one who thinks that too many teams didn't bother looking at the seeding rules?

Re: Weird Qualifying Rules
 

When it gets to the point of dropping in rank after winning a good match (6-4 is a good win, not a blow-out) then there's something screwed up with the ranking system. You shouldn't have to throw a match in order to move up in rank, it simply doesn't make sense.

Re: Weird Qualifying Rules
 

I am certain there are many who haven't bothered to understand the rules for seeding this year. As far as the rules making sense goes, a new game and its rules define the sense to be had. I always think of Bill Cosby's bit about the Naismith basketball game introduction in this context. The game was originally intended as a fitness pastime for football players. It's tough to imagine some of today's football players on the court.

Re: Weird Qualifying Rules
 

After a day of watching the rankings and thinking about it some more, I think I kind of like it.

It means that if you have an unlucky match where bad stuff out of your control happens, you can still actually claw back those lost points and end up #1 seed with a few good matches. In past years a single loss often put you out of the running.

It means that it isn't unthinkable to have a meeting with your opponents before a match to figure out how each alliance can facilitate a high score for both. After all, an 11-9 result is still better for the losing side than a 0-3 win for them. That's cool, because your opponent now becomes your teammate with slightly different incentives.

The rules disincentive playing heavy defense, and encourage maximum scoring by each side (once you get past the first point on both alliances and the n-0 case is gone). If you plan on winning simply by defending your opponents, you're both going to get very few QPs, which makes me happy*.

*I have an axiom that defense as a primary strategy is not a desirable aspect of games. It is possible and acceptable that you don't share this axiom.

Re: Weird Qualifying Rules
 

No, and it would have been beneficial for teams to have had these discussions a while back rather than waiting until the competition season.

Jane

Re: Weird Qualifying Rules
 

So... instead of a Coopertition Bonus it should be called a Collusion Bonus. :rolleyes:

Re: Weird Qualifying Rules
 

Collusion is only bad if it harms others. If both alliances benefit from working as a 6-robot team, then they should.

Collusion to fix prices: bad

Collusion to maximize points: good.

Re: Weird Qualifying Rules
 

I'm just going to ignore the collusion thing for now and comment on the original post.

The largest possible difference in movement between a 0-6 loss and a 4-6 loss is 3 spots. Either way you are getting 6 Seeding points, in the 4-6 loss your opponents get many more seeding points so they may move past you.

Re: Weird Qualifying Rules
 

You haven't explored all the options, though:

Let's say in this scenario that your alliance's scoring capability is 4 points, and your opponent's is 6.

We can derive some facts:
1) If you defend so that you win 4-3, you get 10 QPs, assuming your defending bot wasn't necessary for any of your points and you actually manage to win.
2) If you go for maximum scoring, you lose 6-4 and get 6 QPs.
3) If you go for maximum scoring for your opponent, you "lose" 10-0 and get 10 QPs
4) If you go for minimum scoring, you lose 6-0 and get 6 QPs.

So the two best options are:
A competitive 4-3 match where you hope very strongly the outcome is in your favour, but it might not be.
A "collusive" 10-0 match where you know the outcome is in your favour.

Given a scenario like this, your opponents might agree to the 10-0 option, assuming they aren't trying to overtake you in the standings since it is the "certain" option. If they choose to play a competitive match, then they risk either losing or not getting as many points as they would if they played cooperatively. If either alliance has a robot that is trying to overtake other robots for a better picking position, then other considerations may prevail.

This ranking system makes a team's motivations very complex, which will be hard to decode from the stands, but will make for some good pre-match deliberations.

Re: Weird Qualifying Rules
 

All I explored was the comment in the Original Post about having it be better to lose 0-6 then 4-6.

Re: Weird Qualifying Rules
 

I was just coming to the same conclusion. Glad I'm not the only one!

Re: Weird Qualifying Rules
 

I really hope the AZ Regional will have teams that play smarter than a lot of the teams attending the Week 1 Regionals have been playing.

Re: Weird Qualifying Rules
 

This is why scouting is much more important this year. If the seeding rules make it so some of the best robots are low in the rankings, then teams will have to do more than see who is the top-ranking team when picking alliance partners. Regardless of rankings, just find a team whose partnership creates positive synergies.

Re: Weird Qualifying Rules
 

Defense could be a tremendous part of the finals.

We'll have to see what happens later today.

Re: Weird Qualifying Rules
 

I think that the QP are flawed

My example of this was yesterday at the DC regional. Blue Alliance barely moved the whole match. Red Alliance beats the Blue alliance 8-0. The Red Alliance had 1 penalty so there unpenalized score was 9. According to the rules, Red Alliance gets 8 QPs and Blue Alliance gets 9 QPs even though they lost by 8. Just wanted to point that out.

Re: Weird Qualifying Rules
 

One of the basic rules we use as a team is that you have to play the game. Regardless of personal opinions about the game, you design a robot and build strategies to play the game. The Co-Opertition bonus is very important to your own ranking. If you finish a match 8-0 you are not playing the game.

Re: Weird Qualifying Rules
 

Thats what I think all teams should do. Unfortunately, some teams are more concerned with winning then a good competition. Thats why there should be something in the rules about a mximum amount of points the losing alliance can get.

Re: Weird Qualifying Rules
 

What I meant was that if you are ahead and are looking at a shut-out. It is in your own best interests to score for the opposing alliance rather than continue to increase your lead in that match.

Re: Weird Qualifying Rules
 

oh ok

yep I think drivers will need to pay attention to the score and know if they need to score for the other team.

Re: Weird Qualifying Rules
 

When I first saw the seeding system this year I thought it weird too, but GDC usually has reason for what they do and if you guys had any idea how much debating, experimentation and associated craziness goes on with the development of all this, you'd have a new appreciation for it.

GDC figures out how they want games to look as its being played, then builds the scoring and seeding around that. You can look at the point assignments and sorta figure out how to "work" the system.

IMHO, some things to look out for:

Don't "shut out" your opponent if you win, your coopertition bonus is the sum of their unpenalized points X 2, so theorectically, if they have a couple of goals, you get double that in your coop seeding.

A nasty case is the one where you get like the last match that just happened in KC, final score was 13 - 0, but the winning alliance got a penalty, so the win alliance got 12 seeding points and no Coop bonus (lose allaince was 0), but the lose allaince gets the unpenalized score of the win allaince, so they got 13 seeding points (lose team gets no coop bonus) so the lose team actually came out ahead in seeding, even though they got slammed in the match.

The point is, be smart about the system, ranking is as much a part of the game as the bots on the field, so be educated about it and know how to strategize about it. Complaining about it after the fact is a waste of time. It just shows you didn't investigate the game up front.

Its Week One, teams are still figuring out the game, remember to have fun with it, I'd like to see some good coversations on how to use the rank system system to team advantage. Well, some might not want to give away their strategies :)

Re: Weird Qualifying Rules
 

Do the venues keep "box scores" for the individual teams during qual and elim, and make this data available after the meet ?

Or is the only data available to a team that which their own scouting efforts gather ?

~

Re: Weird Qualifying Rules
 

The FRC FMS system provides the Twitter feeds which breaks out the score detail from a match by alliance, there's also the HTML pages on the FIRST web site, but that doesn't have as much individual match score data. Someone that truely understands the match scoring and ranking can derive everything they need for scouting from the twitter feeds.....

Re: Weird Qualifying Rules
 

Is there an explanation of the data put out by the Twitter feed anywhere?

Re: Weird Qualifying Rules
 

There is an explanation on the FIRST site, here.

Re: Weird Qualifying Rules
 

Can this be accessed with an internet browser? Or is special software required?

Does this include detail at the team level? For example, how many goals, penalties, suspended, did each team get. Stuff like that.

I surfed but didn't see any links to match data at USFIRST.ORG Can you post a link? Thanks.


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Re: Weird Qualifying Rules
 

All I have to say is so much for them saying that this year the fans can understand the scoring. Lets see what happens when a fantastic robot wins all their matches and is last in the seeding. Explain that to the crowd.
Bruce

Re: Weird Qualifying Rules
 

A major part of the problem is the announcers at the venue, and the way they whoop it up when an alliance "wins" a match during the qualifiers.

Perhaps the announcers do not understand either.

FIRST should provide some training for the announcers at each venue.

During the qualifying matches, the announcers should downplay, or even ignore, "wins", and instead announce how many seed points each alliance is awarded for each match. This would educate not only the fans, but many of the unaware teams as well.


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Re: Weird Qualifying Rules
 

This is definitely not true on the webcasts I watched. Tyler Olds at KC (awesome game announcer!) spent a lot of time explaining that you wanted a close match, how many QPs each team would get, etc.

The winner this year does have the benefit in any match where the score is not zero for the opponents. Winning is not completely secondary.

Re: Weird Qualifying Rules
 

Did he announce the QPs after each qual match instead of announcing the "winner" of the match?

That was what I was suggesting.

Take a look at the webcast of the Traverse City qual.


~

Re: Weird Qualifying Rules
 

Jane,

We did talk about it here on CD. With the lack of uproar about it, I assumed (yeah, I know) that teams understood the implications of the new seedeing points.

After participating at GSR, it was quite obvious that many teams did not initially understand all of the implications ... however by Saturday morning (too late) most teams had figured it out.

My hope is that most teams will have now seen how it works and won't try and shut out their opponent. It's just another thing that you need to discuss with your alliance partners before each match.

Re: Weird Qualifying Rules
 

I believe he announced the final score and left it at that, sometimes making a comment that it was a blowout and bad for seeding, etc. I'll catch TC if it gets archived to see what you mean, though.

Re: Weird Qualifying Rules
 

I know it was discussed here in CD and I didn't make my statement clear, sorry. What I meant was that each team in FRC should have read, talked about, and understood all of the implications involved in scoring this year so that they can come to the event(s) that they participate in, prepared. ChiefDelphi is an excellent resource but I don't know that every team in FRC reads it. It is up to each team to make sure that they read the manual, study the rules, and understand them. Hopefully, more teams will be taking advantage of that opportunity before the upcoming competitions, and will be better prepared as teammates and as alliance partners for the rest of the season.

Aside: We can talk and natter and squabble about the best teams/top teams all day long, year after year, and it is silly. This is an example of why - they come to the competition prepared to play.

Jane

Re: Weird Qualifying Rules
 

Unfortunately, other than adding the seeding points in my head after each match, we did not have anything that told the GA's what the seeding score was. I told teams to check in at pit admin in order to find out, and like Chris said, I tried to point out when weird results happened (like the 14-0 game where red alliance got a penalty, which resulted in the blue alliance getting more seeding points). I have to admit it is disappointing that FIRST did really update the final score screen, however I am sure that we will discuss this in the Emcee/GA conference call tomorrow. Weather it will get fixed or not in time for other regionals would be interesting to see.

Jane: While I agree that all teams should know how the seeding is done, what about the spectators and non-FIRSTers who are at the venue? Just a thought, not meant to create an argument or further discussion.

Re: Weird Qualifying Rules
 

We put together a Excel simulation for the seeding points right in the beginning of the season.

http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...t=83903&page=5

Re: Weird Qualifying Rules
 

well from many perspectives scoring on the opponents goal helps if you're up by alot and can afford that luxury, however it makes you look bad for scoring in the nopponents goal.