Quote:
Originally Posted by compwiztobe
However, this year, the dominant strategy is undoubtedly to get at least one assist and consistently truss and score for 10, along side a consistent auto mode. While in Duluth, the rankings reflected this very well, with the best robots all in the top 8, at North Star, the 5 best robots were scattered across the top 30, with the third best machine (by my judgment), 3883, all the way down at 29. This was not because they chose a strategy that lost its effectiveness as the season progressed. This was because they played against literally every other good robot at the event, and never with one of them. 3928 was stuck at 12 and had no choice but to accept the number 2 seed, 4244, a box on wheels that never touched a ball once in their two quarterfinal matches. North Star also had several upsets in elims, while Duluth had none (the blue alliance won a single elimination match). All of this corresponds very neatly with my observation of the reffing and field reset quality at both events, as well as with the strength of schedule of all teams in question. Maybe you could say that the refs made drawing fouls and not having field faults a more competitive strategy at North Star, so the dominant strategy I'm talking about was no longer effective. But I think that would make a lot of people pretty unhappy, and I think that's what this whole conversation is about...
So it's a little rough to tell people to just "Deal with it" when they clearly have been and they clearly should not have to.
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Your own anecdote shows that there are plenty more factors in play than simply game design and reffing. The scheduling algorithm can carry certain teams or doom others to mediocre qualification records, regardless of game. The not-so-random
algorithm in 2007 skewed rankings towards functional younger teams. Similarly, this isn't the only year a "box on wheels" has ranked in the top 8, and having them rank in the top 8 is proof that the disadvantages presented by lower quality partners is not a dominant factor in the ranking system.