[Aren Siekmeier]

Originally Posted by Jon Stratis

Go watch some videos from 2013 Lake Superior, and then try and tell me the seeding was because the nature of the game changed - there were plenty of matches we won where our robot climbing had absolutely nothing to do with it because we screwed up on getting set up for the climb. We were carried in those matches and ranked much better than we really deserved, based purely on robot performance.

I must have misunderstood your original post. My apologies.

I do think your climbing helped you more in Duluth than it did at North Star. There is also something to be said for the fact that the 1st seed selected you in Duluth for your climbing ability, but the same climbing ability was not selected until coming back up the serpentine at North Star. But it sounds like this is irrelevant.

You have a good point. There are ranking inconsistencies every year, produced by the schedule. However, some people (myself included) feel that there are more severe inconsistencies introduced by the foul points, the field reset, and the inconsistent and unreliable refereeing.

Originally Posted by Pranit T

Implying that blue alliance should never win because they clearly have the inferior robots. Nicely done.

The point of the ranking system is to predict robot performance in elimination rounds. An inaccurate ranking system is one that fails to do this. In elimination matches, the higher seed alliance (or the one which beated the higher seed) is red, while the other is blue. So blue winning is what is considered an upset, and is generally thought to be correlated with an inaccurate ranking system. It's just statistics, not an absolute.

Originally Posted by Pranit T

You said it "so and so's machine was easily in the top 5 robots" according to your judgement. Why can't it be that they were ranked lower because maybe they DID adopt a strategy that lost its effectiveness as the season progressed. You are now simply undermining the improvements that the opposing teams could have made before or during the event. If you really think that a team can pick one strategy and stick to it from Week 1 of competition all the way thru Week 6 and Champs, I'm afraid you've got it wrong my friend.

From watching their performance both in Duluth and at North Star, 3883 improved their game and consistently demonstrated excellence at the game tasks during qualification matches, more so than many of the 28 teams who outranked them. Yes, anyone's judgment will be flawed and subjective, but I watched many of the teams at North Star play and actually put some thought into this, I hardly think it's just because I "like their robot."

Originally Posted by Pranit T

You really cant rant about you getting the short end of the stick in a randomized draw. Thus, deal with it.

My point is that there are ranking anomalies because of the refereeing. The schedule is a randomized draw every year, but the claim is that something makes the rankings less accurate this year, and I believe I have shown some evidence of that. The refs make an admirable effort to catch everything and do it right. However, we have had the misfortune to interact with some who are not so professional about making mistakes or missing calls, and some even stray from the rules and updates openly. This may be because they already have too much to worry about, but whoever is at fault, if anyone, it's a problem, and I would like the situation to improve. We can argue about this stuff, or we can recognize problems and try to improve.