[SoftwareBug2.0]

I think the people in this thread are generally on the right track: Nobody should be suprised when a team does what's in its best interest. In my mind, the most important condition for the alliance selection method is that teams are incentivized to perform well in the qualification rounds.

The current setup has worked pretty well, but there is at least one case I haven't seen mentioned yet where it would break down. With the recent games, getting to pick 1st and 16th has almost always been better than 2/15 which is better than 3/14 and so on down to picking 8th and 9th. That's true because the performance gap between the very best teams is higher than the performance gap between average teams.

Assume for a minute that teams score a constant number of points per round and do nothing but offense. The top 5 teams might score 70, 60, 52, 46 and 40 pts while the 20th through 24th teams might score 20, 19, 18, 17, and 16 points. In that case, you can see that having the 2nd best robot on your alliance is worth 60-52=8 points per round more than having the 3rd best robot on your alliance. Meanwhile, the choosing last vs. next to last is worth only 17-16=1 point per round. Since where you pick in the first round makes a bigger impact than where you pick in the second round, you want to be a higher alliance captain despite the serpentine.

However, if the top 16 teams had very similar scoring potential while there was a big drop off in performance between the 17th best robot and the 24th best then it would be better to have the 8th and 9th picks than to have the 1st and 16th because picks 1 and 8 are interchangable while pick 9 is much better than pick 16.

I think having a game where this happens isn't outside the realm of possibility. I would have to look at some historical data to know for sure, but I have an inkling that there might have been more differentiation in the second round than the first in 2005. Edit: Though at a quick glance it appears this was not the case