Quote:
Originally Posted by Wayne TenBrink
A functioning, "simple" machine is best at early events where it is playing against non-functioning "complex" machines that haven't reached their full potential. They will eventually reach a plateau and struggle to remain competitive. I think a team should understand their technical limitation and design within them, but you should always strive to be competitive against the "great" teams, not the pack. Some of us are fortunate enough to have an MSC to aspire to.
|
Absolutely. Scores do improve over the course of an event, and definitely week to week.
This is a "time history" of all matches played in 2011 that illustrates that. I think the number of teams that reach that plateau is relatively small in practice though. As
Jim Zondag pointed out a year ago, roughly 25% of robots are worth less than zero points, and the 50% point doesn't move a whole lot higher. If you count it up, you see that in 2011 the median robot had an OPR of less than 5 points!
In all fairness my team in 2006 won a regional by that formula of aiming low and actually working. Sure we shot from the ramp -- but we were one the few teams at the event who could reliable score our starting balls.
Our target audience is really the teams that are missing out on eliminations (roughly that 50%), hence the name of the blog. Of course, we also hope it is somewhat useful to everyone. We don't want everyone to field a Dozer -- but we hope our analysis pushes some teams who haven't had much on the field success to emulate him.