Quote:
Originally Posted by IKE
You don't necessarily "assume', but you might hope. I could give you numerous examples of robots that finally got the bugs out late, and then won the whole thing (with their alliances help of course). I can think of 2/4 division champion alliances last year that had such a partner.
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Sure you can hope -- but as many of the posts in this thread indicate, much of the scouting considerations take place on Friday night, and at that point some teams have only played half of their matches and don't have their bugs worked out until Saturday. Based on this logic, the analysis from Friday night would remove those "buggy" teams from the running even if they had potential.
In San Diego, I had our scouts editing picks in real time during the final day to account for performance of the robots, because it doesn't really matter how good/bad a team does in its first few matches, but how well the bot is performed in the last few in prep for the elims. Case in point -- we saw Team 702 have some field connection issues beyond their control in SD (lowering their seed ranking significantly), but after watching them in the second day decided to pick them for our alliance based on their latest performance.
Conversely, in Los Angeles it was my team having all the bad communication issues the first day, and it wasn't until Saturday that we managed to get everything working well. Some other teams I scouted performed great in their first few rounds, then had a mechanical failure or flipped and had to remove a key actuator. That's just the way these things go, so it's hard to tell.
Nevertheless, it's interesting to see teams in this thread post that "7 of the top 24 in our list was a rookie", yet not a single rookie was chosen by anybody.