Quote:
Originally Posted by Citrus Dad
Don't you think that it would be great to have teams like 254 working with rookie and newer teams in the fall? Again, listen to EJ's talk--they stepped up their involvement with other teams (which was already extensive) because of the incentives in the game. Why not extend that incentive to early in the year when those teams have more available time and resources? Please don't say that they already do this--EJ's comments prove that these teams can step up even more with the right changes.
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I'm trying to understand why you think that FIRST announcing a cooperation aspect of the game in the fall will incentivize teams to help neighboring teams before competition even begins.
I listened to the GameSense show, and 254 was incentivized by this game to help their own alliance partners before their matches. While this is advantageous to do every year, the "multiplier effect" of having 3 good robots on your alliance made this even more crucial this year. Thus, I agree that Aerial Assist probably caused more support of lower-caliber partner teams than was seen in other years (although I would need more than one anecdote to be confident about this).
However, let's think about the opponents of 254. I have in the past heard stories of teams helping out the very team that they will be competing against in the next match. While I am certain that these situations happen, I am also certain that teams help out their partners for upcoming matches far more than they ever help their opponents.
So we come to your "fall announcement" idea. What about this game specifically would have incentivized 254 to go out of their way to help local teams in the fall? There are already some very good reasons to help out other teams, but this game, even had it been fully announced in September would not have been one of them in my mind. The reason why this game causes no additional incentive to help out teams in the fall comes from the way FRC matches are currently structured. Since, in any given qual match, you are partnered with 2 random robots, and against 3 random robots, you are 50% more likely to be helping out an eventual opponent than you are an eventual partner when you help out a random team in the fall. This is the same as any other year, thus, I don't see how FIRST doing anything like what you have suggested in the fall would cause additional incentive to help local teams.
I suppose an argument could be made that 254 could stand to gain a little from reducing the variance induced by the randomly generated schedule, but it doesn't seem that you are making this argument.
Again, I'm just trying to understand why you think announcing a "cooperation aspect" of the game will cause any additional incentive to help teams before the match schedule is even generated, please enlighten me.