Quote:
Originally Posted by AdamHeard
Weighting matches based on current years ranking is inherently unfair. You are punishing a team and decreasing their chance of future success based on previous success, and rewarding teams with low success with a higher chance of future success.
In FRC efforts to make it fair should end after registration; Every team has equal opportunity to compete, build, find mentors, fund raise, etc... No competitive boost should be given to under-performing teams. They had just as much of a chance to make amazing happen as the teams that routinely do, don't punish the teams that work hard for that.
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Why do performance metrics have to completely dominate the algorithm's decision making process? Why do we all have to view the inclusion of OPR or similar into the algorithm as an attempt to completely balance the competitive scales in each and every match?
Why couldn't we use OPR or some other performance ranking method in the scheduling algorithm as a "sanity check" during the scheduling process to ensure the net strength of an alliance relative to the proposed opposing alliance doesn't skew past some ultra-extreme, ridiculously-impossible to overcome threshold? Matches of this nature are likely to lead to an utter slaughter on the field. I would like to think that the slaughterers would not particularly enjoy such a monumental cakewalk, as it doesn't really challenge them, the slaugterees would definitely not enjoy it, and most importantly, the crowd would find such matchups boring as hell. So why not try to eliminate or minimize these outlying extremes in the schedule without trying to perfectly balance each and every match?
Not only do such matchups as described above happen a lot at events, they sometimes happen to the
same team multiple times at an event. When that occurs, such teams begin to feel that they are not getting enough of a positive experience and equal opportunity for success relative to other teams for the money they invest in a competition. That should never happen.
There were people involved with writing earlier FIRST scheduling algorithms that stated overconfidently that certain scheduling goals were impossible to be achieved. People like Jim Zondag and the Saxtons took it upon themselves to prove those people wrong. They sought to create their own algorithm implementations, and they were successful in proving that "impossible" criteria could in fact be successfully implemented into a match scheduling algorithm.
So for all the newly doubtful, I propose there is someone out there who DOES have the ability to create an algorithm that mixes in some reliance on ranking metrics to balance out the match lists, at least enough to avoid frequent "slaughterhouse" matchups that no one really enjoys. I fully support anyone bold enough to take that challenge on and prove to everyone it CAN be done!