Quote:
Originally Posted by Wayne Doenges
About the only way you could stop the Scorched Earth strategy is to not allow the top 8 team to pick any of the other top 8 teams 
Now that would make some interesting alliances. |
There is one expo tournament we've played several times (the IGVC invitational) with exactly 24 teams, where teams are assigned alliances (1-9-17, 2-10-18... 8-16-24). Saturday morning there is sometimes a strong incentive for a team thats 7th or 8th to lose a match to drop to 9th-12th and get a better overall alliance.
If you disallow picking within the top 8, teams will do the same thing to get below 8th to allow themselves to be picked first.
OCCRA does a similar thing (no picking within the top 6). There was a team this year who was 4th going into their last match and planned on throwing it to drop below 6th. Another team (I don't remember their exact placing) who was opposing them in this match knew this and decided to play for the opposing alliance to prevent them from throwing the match and dropping below the cutoff to be pickable (the outcome did not affect this team enough for them to be concerned). In the match, both teams in question scored points for the opposing alliance, so they were literally both trying their hardest to increase their opponents score. The fans were shouting "YOURE BLUE YOUR BLUE" and "NO YOUR RED" and it was really strange. You would see the same exact thing happen in FIRST if picking within the top 8 was forbidden.
I have no issue with scorched earth plays as far as the rules or GP is concerned. The 1st seed has earned their spot by the rules of the game. If we want the best alliances possible (which I think we do), we just need to play more matches so the 1st seed is really the best (or very good) and the lower seeds would have little reason to decline. Changing the rules in any way I can think of would just make everything worse.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Chris is me
Even in 2010 there were teams with better schedules than others (and, as good at ranking teams as it was, not a ton of people want to go back to 2010 for some reason).
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The 2010 seeding system was quite good when everyone played to win IMHO, but I think a lot of people still remember the 6v0 plays and scoring for opponents to increase your seeding and dislike it for that reason. And before the +5 in a team update there was no reason to score if you knew you had no hope of winning (this was hotly debated, but we did play a 6v0 once successfully, and talked it about at least two other times).