Quote:
Originally Posted by Chris is me
I feel that the "real" problem here isn't with the act of declining, but how it looks. What if captains said "Thanks for the invitation, but we would like to form our own alliance"? That is better in so many ways. For one, it's less harsh than "we decline", which is a more obvious and outright rejection that can look petty or disrespectful. Secondly, it explains *why* they are declining - the team believes it can form a better alliance from a different seeding position.
I feel like if the presentation is change, attitudes about it will change as well. Right now the rationale is obscured, the ceremony is awkward, and the audience is left confused. If we fix it, maybe these won't be a problem.
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I can't say I've actually ever seen anyone just say "we decline"... Most I've seen say "Team xxx respectfully declines as we would like to form our own alliance" or occassionally I guess the "team xxx graciously declines" (which is annoyingly bad grammar, but at least trying not to be rude). Even those responses are usually met with a slight audience shock of "Ohhhhh". But I think the problem is "Ohhh" "Ooooo" and "Boooo" all sound a lot alike... I've had trouble before trying to figure out if the audience is ooo'ing or boo'ing. But I agree, some of it is the perception.
I also think its very much the job of the MC to take care of the "how it is perceived". A good MC will always explain to the audience ahead of the alliance selections that it is an alliance captain's right to decline & form their own alliance if they think they have a better/more complimentary strategy that way. And the MC will always deal immediately with any decline by reinforcing to the audience that the declining team has a different strategy. I am pretty sure I've seen Blair, Karthik and Eric deal very well with this before... I'm sure there are others... but really the MC's can really help mitigate the confusion.
But ultimately, I think its sort of always going to be a small shock factor, because I would guess that maybe 70% of the FIRST population is like Skinkworks' team and is just excited to accept, so they have very little understanding why a team "would not trust" a higher ranked team, or what the strategy could possibly be that could be better than playing with a higher ranked team.
In reality it's all like a chess match... you have to envision your ultimate goal in the whole competition, and if it's to win the event, you need to step your way backwards through every move/match/selection in order to maximize your potential of winning. If there is a path through the selections & eliminations that leads you to a better chance of winning in the finals, then its very often worth the shot.
When I used to develop pick lists with 1511, we always had our selection of 1-30, and at some point in that list we drew a line and said "if anyone below this line picks you, decline and form your own alliance". Sometimes there were teams ranked higher than us that were below that line, or even below our top 30. In that case our student would decline, because we could form a much stronger alliance on our own.