Quote:
Originally Posted by Andrew Schuetze
I am working on a take home final due @ 5:00 PM today and keeping an eye on scores and it appears that a lot of the division quarter final matches are very close games. This would seem to validate that the game design folks created scoring options that didn't have a choke hold strategy as well as provided a greater number of teams the ability to design and build effective scroing machines  |
Either that or they designed a game with tremendous diminishing returns on the tube rack. If your alliance could score 12 tubes and your opponent could only score 6, you got 96 points while your opponent got 72 (assuming 3 top row ubertubes). If you could score all 18, you got 108 points. That's a 33% higher score for 2x the number of tubes and a 50% higher score for 3x more tubes. That's the main reason for the close scores, not because the alliances were more evenly matched than in past years.
Quote:
Originally Posted by martin417
254, 111 and 1114 were all awesome, but with 111 and 1114 both outside the top 8 we could do nothing to break up an eventual killer alliance that we felt would probably end up going all the way (as they did).
|
Luck sure did play into our win this year. At the beginning of matches on Saturday, we had a chance to be anywhere between 1st and 10th seed depending on how a few key matches went. If we won and a few teams lost or had low RP matches, we would be 1st. If we lost and a few other teams won and had high RP matches, we would be 10th or maybe even lower. We ended up losing our match (partly because one of the motor leads snapped off on our minibot) and finishing 0.40 points out of 8th place. Another possibly lucky break for us is that 1771 finished 1st and chose 1114. If 254 was 1st they
may have chosen 1114 instead of us and they certainly would have plowed through the divisional bracket regardless of the other alliance pairings.
As a side note, this scenario reminds me of 2001 when we were less than a ranking point away from being 8th seed and getting auto-paired with the 4th seed for eliminations. Being 9th allowed us to get selected by 33 & 254 where we won Archimedes and were runners-up on Einstein.