In terms of everyone picking their own back-up/4th bot, I'm not sold on the idea. It makes for an interesting debate on multiple fronts.
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Originally Posted by waialua359
As the pressure to increase the # of teams at CMP keeps coming up, how about increasing the # of teams that make eliminations similar to offseason events such as IRI? Good teams can continue to play, other than the 8-10 matches in recent CMP events.
The format of just 24 making eliminations out of 100 or more teams, seems a bit too low.
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Why does it seem too low? Just because a larger percentage of teams make eliminations at regionals than Championship? This is the
championship event, shouldn't there be a higher grade of exclusivity there, both in terms of who qualifies for the event and who qualifies for eliminations? Why further dilute the field of competitors? We already have a 96 team tournament.
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Originally Posted by waialua359
2013 was the perfect example of why such a format would have been useful.
Teams were rushing to get reinspected after they attached a blocker against full-court shooters.
At IRI and TRR, we just selected a robot that could already do it.
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This obviously changed the game (and alliance selection) dynamic heavily, and without a clear answer of if it's "better" or "worse." It's obvious how the proposed format encourages both building and selecting "specialized" robots and role players over well-rounded machines. It's clearly not as simple as picking the next 8 "best" robots in the field, and I'd venture to say it would likely also impact earlier parts of alliance selection.
To me, one of my favorite parts of the elimination tournament is seeing robots suddenly change their strategy to match an opponent. Rather than playing "rock, paper, scissors" with which robots to put into a match, teams would have to adapt strategically (and sometimes mechanically, as you mentioned with mounting blockers) on the fly. I find moments when teams like 469, 973, and 1126 suddenly become shutdown defenders or 217 scrambling to attach pool noodles or 1114 and 294 working together to improve mini-bot launchers as some of the coolest and most memorable moments of elimination tournaments. I love the strategic engineering that occurs when you have to figure out how to make your alliance composed of X, Y, and Z beat an alliance of A, B, and C.
Quote:
Originally Posted by waialua359
I would guess that every team that attends CMP would want a greater chance at making eliminations.
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I also addressed the exclusitivity of the elimination tournament. I obviously also see the merit of trying to enhance the experience of many teams at Championship.
The biggest appeal of adding teams to the elimination tournament for me would be mitigating the impact of "weak" alliance captains (assuming they were humble enough to bench themselves). We always see a few alliance captains each year who are borderline elimination teams (or sometimes worse), and rather than damning their alliance partners to a quarter-final exit, a back-up bot may increase their odds.