[apalrd]

There was no direct bonus in 2010. You got a seeding bonus if you won a close match, rather than a complete blowout. This led to the 6v0 if you knew you couldn't win, or scoring (possibly several times) for your opponents when you were up by a large margin. The coopertition award was based on the largest number of 2x opponents points, and this served to reduce defense in quals (IMO).

There was no bonus at all in 2011, that I can remember. The coopertition award was based on giving away minibots in qualifications, which I don't recall ever happening at an event I attended, due to differences in deployment mechanisms and such. The teams who had engineered a good deployment mechanism usually could engineer a good minibot to go with it.

2012 had the coopertition bridge. At the lowest level of competition, it was awful because nobody could balance and you were relying on the skills of your partner to help you win. In the middle, it was OK, but everyone would always do it so it gave you a disadvantage for failing rather than an advantage for doing it. At the highest level, the teams would try to spend less time doing it and more time scoring, leading to more failures and less points. And, as noted, some teams did intentionally try to screw over the powerhouse teams, which is very very bad. The co-op bridge also added a lot of noise to the rankings at any event, and IMHO the point of the ranking system is to estimate the best teams going into elims, to allow the best team to pick first, so intentionally adding noise is directionally incorrect.

AND, to make everything worse, the 2012 coopertition award was based on high coopertition point but a low ranking point. At the first event we went to (week 1), we assumed a team who had co-oped 5 times (more than anyone else) would certainly win the award, but it ended up going to a team who had never done it themselves, were ranked really low because they lost almost every match, and on the field during a few co-ops.

IMO, the 2012 implementation of the co-op bridge AND the co-op award was terrible. I'm glad to see it go. I'm welcome better suggestions, but doing it that way was not good.