Quote:
Originally Posted by Racer26
I haven't seen anybody in this thread mention it yet, but FIRST actually tried this one year, and as everyone has said, it just lead to meta-gaming by top teams, purposefully sandbagging to seed outside the top 8.
Interesting that this suggestion has come up at the same time as a thread about playing to win matches vs playing to win an event.
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What FIRST actually tried was automatic pairings among the top 8 teams, which was an even greater incentive to trying to manipulate the ranks in a game that was already very different from any other.
In 2001, the game was played by 4 robots working together attempting to score as many points as possible as quickly as possible (you got score multipliers for stopping a match early). Elimination alliances were comprised of 5 teams, with 4 on the field for any one match. Each round of the tournament consisted of two alliances alternating matches, each trying to score more points than the other alliance did in the match before.
Due to the size of alliances relative to the size of most events, there were only four elimination alliances formed at regionals. The #1 seed was automatically paired with the #5 seed, the #2 with #6, #3 with #7, and #4 with #8. Afterwards, alliance selection occurred with the #1/4 alliance picking first, and so forth (no "serpentine" element until 2006).