Re: Am I the only one who LOVED the seeding system this year?
 

Win: C + 2*L + W.
Loss: L + W.
Tie: 3*score

Note: For the winner, L is unpenalized, W is penalized. For the loser, reverse that.

Strategy/Analysis: Getting your own score as a bonus if you win gives an incentive to score, score, score. Getting double the loser's unpenalized score is an incentive to not have a blowout. If it is a blowout, say 10-1, the loser gets 11. The winner gets 12 + the constant. If the constant is fairly small, it keeps the seedings close enough that one bad match can't throw you way down the rankings, but a lot of them will. Ditto for one good match and a lot of good matches.

Doing a difference factor would need to be carefully thought about, and it should probably be applied to both teams. I'd rather not get into that right now.

Re: Am I the only one who LOVED the seeding system this year?
 

I dont know, maybe its just my own preferences as a driver for 4 years, but defense is fun. I mean, shutting out a top team is just as rewarding, AND should be just as beneficial to your score as playing for the win. stopping the best team was the way to win in previous years, or so i observed. Also, maybe it was just because my team was only at NJ week 1, but every time we won a match we went down in standings. yeah, that felt awesome. now i know the rules were changed, and that would have made things different, but i still dont like to see the losers get more ranking points than the winners. thats just not how any other game works.

Re: Am I the only one who LOVED the seeding system this year?
 

This doesn't quite fix the problem. If I'm playing against a team ahead of me in the standings and have decided the match is a loss I will still score in their goal because every goal I score for myself moves them further ahead of me, while scoring for them moves us both ahead equally. Any new system can't give the winner more for the losers score then the loser gets.

Re: Am I the only one who LOVED the seeding system this year?
 

You also can't give the loser any more for the winner's score than the winner gets, which is what would have happened this year without the Coopertition Bonus and the addition of the constant. At that point, it's winner's and loser's scores (penalized and not) and whatever constants you throw in. Why even bother then? Go with total unpenalized points for the winner, loser's points for the loser, and watch teams who lose a lot of high-scoring matches by a point or two end up at the top of the standings. Then somebody complains that robots who aren't the top robots are up there, which is probably one reason we had this system in the first place.

Honestly, any system you do is going to disappoint somebody. This year's made a lot of people happy or almost happy (due to encouraging 6v0 in certain situations). The ones that aren't don't like 6v0, and I don't blame them.

Re: Am I the only one who LOVED the seeding system this year?
 

I liked that the seeding system ranked teams based on their performance. I would also say that there was a more accurate rating than normal. But I would not necessarily put this all on the new seeding system. This year at events around the country, people got to play more matches than they had in previous years. The effect of more matches is huge. It is harder to get lucky and carried to a top 8 position when you are playing 10-12 matches than it is playing 8. I would say at district events in 09 the top teams seeded in the top spots more often than not, not just because they were good, but because they played a lot of matches and were able to consistently perform.

Under the W/L/T system you had a straight forward and simple way to rank teams. Anyone could understand that. However if my roommate came to an event under this seeding system and just started watching he would be completely confused on why people were blocking their own goals and scoring for their opponents.

My team played in a 6v0 match at the Kettering District event, and debated doing it on multiple other occasions. The fact that three teams came to us before a match and told us they were not going to try and win makes me think this system is flawed.

This system would work fine as a second tiebreaker. Instead of Ranking Points I think that the Co-Opertition Seeding would be a great way to show how good teams were. But your first tiebreaker always needs to be wins.

If FIRST's overall goal is to make a game that is ready for TV, then they need to get rid of the seeding system. Games should be played to be won and anything that takes away from that undermines the enjoyment of what is on the field.

Re: Am I the only one who LOVED the seeding system this year?
 

I know this has been stated in other forms by other people, but I'd like to reiterate it:

My problem with the 2010 seeding system isn't so much the system itself, but rather it's implications. I don't like that the goals and thus the strategy of match play is different in qualifications than in eliminations. We should rank alliances using the same criteria we use to eliminate them. It makes no sense to do it any other way.

Re: Am I the only one who LOVED the seeding system this year?
 

That would be great. When FIRST adopted the W/L/T seeding, teams widely hailed it as a wonderful thing. Suddenly qualification match play aligned with the way elimination matches were going to be played.

Unfortunately, you don't get a reliably good ranking result with a dozen or fewer matches. Unless each team plays both with and against a large fraction of the other teams, a simple win/lose tally won't work well.

If the goal is to have the "best" robots play the elimination rounds, the Breakaway seeding algorithm is pretty good. Unless you've designed your robot to play defense at the expense of scoring ability, I don't think it should make a big difference in match play.

Re: Am I the only one who LOVED the seeding system this year?
 

1. Many years, the offense related task is significantly more difficult to do than the defense task of stopping said person by hitting them. Yes, there are very skilled defensive drivers that have mastered the art of pummeling bots, however it is typically easier to get good at defending than it is to get good at scoring.
Case in point this year, a bot could stop a scorer by driving between the scorer and the goal. In order to score the ball, the scorer had to then move the ball to the other goal without getting a penalty, without loosing control of the ball, and then score it. The other bot had to drive sideways and get into the way. For this reason I like offense related ranking systems.

2. Changing the seeding strategy from Quals to Elims also requires teams to modify their stratagies. This adds a new role and importance to the scouting/strategy team. We customized our strategy for each qualifying match in order to get the maximum amount of Seeding points. This was a very inspiring challenge for me and my team.

Re: Am I the only one who LOVED the seeding system this year?
 

It promotes a certain KIND of best robot. As you point out, not defense or even infinite loop machines like #469 (they do OK but they had to fight to be even a ranked team).

By the way, I am okay with FIRST deciding to promote a certain kind of robot. While all robots inspire (or can) some are more fun to watch than others. Watchability is something that helps advance the goals of FIRST so I am perfectly okay with that.

Perhaps my biggest bone of contention (which the winning bonus solved for the most part) was that if teams tried to maximize their seeding points, it was going to be very confusing to watch (my mom would have not been happy to see Match 100 on Curie -- rules and strategy be damned, it was confusing to watch).

Joe J.

Re: Am I the only one who LOVED the seeding system this year?
 

Not only would it be confusing for spectators, but potentially degrading for the other robots of the "losing" alliance of a 6v0. I'm sure 231 and 288 had agreed to 1114's plan in Curie match 100, but ultimately it cost each of them a chance to showboat their robots. By that point Friday, the rankings were starting to become established, and scouts of potential top 8 teams may have been in the stands watching. By sitting in the goals for the entire match, they weren't showing off their possible offense/defense/drive skill/ball handling abilities.

Re: Am I the only one who LOVED the seeding system this year?
 

To summarize some ideas:

Winners: W+2L+C
Losers: W
Tie: 3T
Promotes winners scoring for low scoring loosers, and known losers opting out for a 6v0. Ties are great, but near ties result in the winning team getting approximately 300% the loser score. (20:19 = 58+c:20) High scoring matches will cause giant boosts in rankings.
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Winners: W+2L+C
Losers: 2L
Tie: 3T or 2T
Promotes high scoring from both sides. Winners should score for opponents if scoring for opponents is less than 2x as hard as scoring for themselves during a blowout. Defense should be minimized for small values of C. As C increases relative to scoring possibilities, the value of the win increases. As the value of a win increases, there is a higher incentive to use defense to create a win. At a near tie, Winners will get about 50% more points than losers plus a constant. (20:19 = 58+c:38). 3T means we should try for a tie vs. 2T which just says you will not be quite a screwed from a tie. High scoring matches will still cause giant boost, but a high scoring loss will not kill your qualification possibilities.
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Winners: W+L+C
Losers: 2L
Tie: 2T
Promotes high scoring from both sides. There is no incentive for Winners to score for their opponents as points are equal. There is also no disincentive for your opponents to score. Defense should be minimized for small values of C. In theory 6 machines scoring should have a higher total than 4 scoring and 2 defending. As C increases relative to scoring possibilities, the value of the win increases. As the value of a win increases, there is a higher incentive to use defense to create a win. At a near tie, Winners will get about the same as losers plus a constant. (20:19 = 39+c:38) High scoring matches will remain relatively balanced. C is really the only incentive to Win, but scoring lots is a huge incentive to seeding. having the "ideal" match is significantly less critical to seeding high. (this one is my favorite as tweaking a single constant C can give you the field behaviour you want to see).
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Using a scoring delta (W-L) in the denominator such as loser ss= W/(W-L) incentives a close match from the losers perspective, but also incentives defense from the winners perspective. There is a huge swing in points difference between loosing by 1 vs. loosing by 2. Any of those formulas are also difficult to understand.

Re: Am I the only one who LOVED the seeding system this year?
 

I disagree with you Joe (partially anyway).

There are many rules in sports (the safety in footbal, the infield fly rule in baseball, team orders in Formula 1, etc.) that are confusing the first time you see them. After you see it once and the announcer explains the situation, it's not very confusing any more. Now I agree that FIRST should keep the rules as obvious as possible without needing an explaination, there will always be rules that are in the background that the spectators don't know about (or need to know about) until the need to explain arises. Certain penalties are a good case in point: "why did team XYZ get a penalty when they crossed that bump into the defensive zone?" - that would also be confusing the first time a spectator saw it, but I won't advocate removing that rule from the books based on confusion alone.

Re: Am I the only one who LOVED the seeding system this year?
 

I like seeing defense in matches. To me, it makes them more exciting. The best teams can still maneuver around the defensive robots. Of course, this is a personal preference, and might be related to my region. I also like games which have multiple strategies involved in them and recognize the importance of scouting, but something about changing the objectives of match play because of the ranking system just doesn't feel right to me. I don't hate this year's ranking system, but I haven't fully bought into it either.

Re: Am I the only one who LOVED the seeding system this year?
 

Okay, how about this: let's take the AP poll, the Coaches poll, six computer rankings (drop the highest and lowest of course) and then add them all up. That should take all the controversy away...or maybe not I seem to recall some other sport having trouble with rankings.

Re: Am I the only one who LOVED the seeding system this year?
 

I like the way that a scoring delta (W-L) in the denominator highly incentivises close matches, as that seems to be what FIRST wants to do, while at the same time disincentivising scoring for your opponent. This would totally remove any incentive to play 6v0. However, its a more complex SS algorithm, and therefore harder to understand. I like IKE's third one. Its simple, and results in good payoffs for both. It doesnt, however, incentivise a close match.