Quote:
Originally Posted by lemiant
It seems very unfair that the 10-18 teams are screwed for champs spots even compared to the less deserving group of 19-24 ranked teams.
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OK. Stop. By saying that the 19-24 ranked teams are "less deserving", and the 10-18 teams are "screwed for champs spots", you are making multiple assumptions. I'm not even gonna
touch the "unfair" part of that statement directly--I think it'll be dealt with as I go through this.
First: You are assuming that the rankings mean anything about the quality of the robots. Any assumption you have along those lines is not true due to the ranking system. It may be valid at a particular regional. It may even be valid at most regionals. But it is not valid across the board.
Second: Why is a robot ranked lower than another robot any less deserving? Team 4. Los Angeles Regional, 2006 and 2007. Picked out of the
bottom of the field both times. They have two blue banners from that, and I'll tell you for a fact, they earned both of them. Any claim that they were "carried" is without merit--they were one really good defender and pushed at least their weight around the field.
Third: Now I'm addressing the "screwed" part. Why do you think we play the game? If you want to go there, Einstein 2010 was a waste of time; 1114 and 469 won. (For those keeping track at home, 67, 177, and 294 have the blue banners for Einstein 2010.) Three years before, 177, 190, and 987 should have just laid down--they'd have never made it out of the divisional semis. Again, each has a blue banner from Einstein 2007. To carry this into professional sports, the Yankees and the Patriots should just get the titles each year. (See: 2007 and 2012 for the Patriots in the Super Bowl.)
If we didn't play the game, you'd be right. But we play the game, we play to win, and we play strategy.
Fourth: You mean "picked teams" not "ranked teams". There is a difference. An 11th ranked team is not necessarily an 11th picked team. In fact, they might be the 8th picking team, and picking the 32nd ranked and 15th ranked teams in that order. (Making up numbers here... but it's not out of the question.)
Enough ranting out of me on that. I have a challenge for anybody complaining about the serpentine draft:
Come up with another system that works.
You need to reward teams for seeding first somehow (otherwise, why bother?), you need to make it so it won't take forever to get alliances, and you need to have it reliably come up with exciting matches all through the finals, preferably with a lot of upsets. Oh, and you need to have it so that teams won't throw matches to be picked by their preferred teams, or pre-make alliances and decline out of all others. (Both of which were determined to be issues in the first two years of alliances.) Go!