|
Re: Climbing and dumping not winning?
I would say a lot of it comes down to the game that 50 point climber/dumpers are designed to play. This thread has already pointed out that a dedicated dumper is capped with a max score of around 50 points per match. That's better than the average robot score but is a far cry from the 70+ that many primary scorers can put up on Championship alliances at the regional level (consider further that almost none of the dumpers have 100% consistency, which puts their average score below 50).
An alliance relying on a dumper as one of its primary scorers isn't likely to win a shootout because of the cap on scoring that the dumper has. If an alliance is built primarily around a dumper bot the only way they're going to win IMO is by going all out on defense (similar to the triple balance alliances at the regional level last year). Keeping the disc scores low for the opposing alliance makes the 50 point dump worth more relative to their score and could be a winner when combined with some decent autonomous scores and 10 point hangs from the other alliance members. Since the majority of the dumpers take half the match (or more) to load and score the rest of the alliance is left in a 2v3 situation which makes playing all out defense that much tougher. They probably will score hardly any teleop discs because they won't be able to do anything other than try to stop the opposing alliance from scoring. The biggest issue facing this strategy is autonomous scoring because the alliance will probably cap out around 100 points maximum. If the opposing alliance has a 5 or 7 disk autonomous and racks up 70+ points when you can't defend them then the match is already over.
I do hope that dumpers are a part of some of the championship alliances as 2nd round picks at the Championship (or deep events like the district championships). At a deep event most of the 1st round picks are going to be high scoring disc machines, if the dumpers don't end up as a lower seeded alliance captain they could make a very valuable 3rd partner to an alliance wanting to go all out on offense. Could you imagine the scores from an alliance of 2056, 987, and a 50 point dumper?
__________________
FRC Team 498 (Peoria, AZ), Student: 2004 - 2007
FRC Team 498 (Peoria, AZ), Mentor: 2008 - 2011
FRC Team 167 (Iowa City, IA), Mentor: 2012 - 2014
FRC Team 2662 (Tolleson, AZ), Mentor: 2014 - Present
|