Quote:
Originally Posted by antimatter_john
Exactly what? There was no exactly to my question. My question is is why is IT SO IMPORTANT TO KEEP RAW DATA KEPT AWAY FOR ONLY CERTAIN TEAMS. (No yelling inteded just want to get my point across). There is no point. Yuo even said your self
If I am missing something please tell me.
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Because scouting is a whole other aspect to the competition. There are teams who devote themselves to having great scouting systems in order to gain a competitive advantage. And they absolutely deserve that advantage, in the same way that teams who devote themselves to building their robot deserve a competitive advantage, and the teams who devote themselves to outreach and the chairman's presentation deserve an advantage in the chairman's award. If the data was made public, then all of the sudden every team has access to this awesome resource, and all of the time and effort which some teams have put into developing their own systems is wasted. I'm definitely not on one of those great scouting teams, but I know that if I was then this happening would make me pretty frustrated.
Also, you've made the assumption that all big-medium teams have good scouting systems, but that is not at all true. Many teams, including those with fairly decent robots, still struggle to get any sort of meaningful scouting data. And I don't want it to be this way, but the solution is not just to hand them data that they didn't earn. That's one of the things that I like about crowd scouting the way the op is presenting it; it gives teams the opportunity to have good scouting, but they have to work for it. There is no reason why most* teams can't send 2 students to help the crowdscouting effort. So why make it optional?
*Of course there are some exceptions, but those should be handled on a case by case basis rather than as a general rule.