Quote:
Originally Posted by Abhishek R
Regardless of how well you plan before a match, it does often boil down to whether a team is able to keep up with the rest of the alliance. Yes FIRST is about inspiring, but on the field, it's a competition. And in this competition, it's the alliance that wins regionals, not individual teams. So it comes down to how your alliance plays each match, for better or for worse.
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I like to think that build season and off season is for building character, and competition season is for getting wins. Of course, winning is not the absolute most important thing, but it's the cherry on top. Getting the most out of FIRST does not require winning, but what team in their right mind builds a robot designed for losing?
This is the kind of conversation a crazy team like this would have:
Student 1: "Hey, let's make this robot have no wheels, and no scoring mechanism"
Student 2:"why?"
Mentor: "Well, it's not all about winning!"
Rookie Student: "This is so uninspiring... I'm joining 1114"
My point is, that everyone builds a robot with the intent that their robot will score as many points as possible to win, but what is just as good as your own robot contributing to the alliance win is another alliance robot contributing to the win. You get the same seeding points for whatever amount of participation in the match. I would be grateful for that, even if my team didn't do what we wanted.
We willingly did this at the 2013 Colorado Regional. We were the number one seeded alliance, and chose 2169, King TeC, the best cross field shooter in FIRST as our alliance partner, who I believe was either in second or third seed. But anyway, our robot was designed to shoot, and although it did well doing that, and the students put their blood, sweat, and tears into making a really good shooter, we understood that King TeC's was even better. At our matches, we played defense with our other alliance member 2259 1/4 Twenties, to keep away blocker robots. We broke 200 points a few matches, and we were glad to have our wins, even though our robot didn't contribute to the actual disk scoring, but we defended to keep 2169 safe to shoot cross court. Were we disappointed that we didn't do what our robot was designed to do? No, because we did it for the win, and we dominated eliminations because of it.