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Unread 08-05-2014, 13:42
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AKA: Greg King
FRC #1014 (Dublin Robotics aka "Bad Robots")
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Re: Fouls that "Didn't Affect the Outcome of the Match"

Quote:
Originally Posted by Siri View Post
I understand the point about potentially biased methodologies, but the analyses (at least the one I linked), aren't saying that more foul points were scored this year--they're at least attempting to speak to the consequentiality question.

Good catch on 2011; I'd blanked on the coin flip. Not just the towers malfunctioning, but the refs-as-garage-door-sensors. Another real- to post- scoring agreement without a view of reality. Albiet I personally saw a lot more problems in 2011 than 2014 (the later certainly non-negligible), which is pretty impressive considering 2011 was so much easier to spot unless someone really pushed the window. Fortunately, once I assumed it was an end-match coin flip, it didn't much affect strategy. (Honestly, it was a coin flip by the end anyway, so the failures were mostly just annoying.)

I still can't grasp the argument that 2013 was hard to keep track of, though. Even if the real-time was bad at the event, the math was easy and you only had to tally at the walls, as opposed to tallying assists everywhere for both balls.
My point about isn't that anyone's methodology was bad or biased. Just that a question like "was this foul consequential?" is a hard question to answer statistically. It is pretty clear to me that the fact that fouls were a bigger percentage of the total points is evidence that points to fouls being more consequential this year than the last two. A comparison of fouls to margin of victory might be better, but then again I can think of some reasons why it might not. But there are probably some better ways to attack the question, but most of those would require knowing when fouls occurred. But I am still noodling around trying to find a good way to approach the issue.

As for 2013, I (and my team) found it frustrating that there were many matches where the final score was dramatically different than what was on the scoreboard at the end of the match. I don't know that our strategy was necessarily changed all that much, but twice we thought we had wins and lost, and one thought we lost when we won.

I am not arguing that Aerial Assist was without flaws. In many ways I think the flaws were more irritating to me than they might have been because there were some simple fixes that could have greatly improved things. I took a team to Crossroads and the Championships, and I was a referee at Queen City, so I saw the game from two different perspectives. I think the single biggest issue was having the referees both calling fouls and scoring the match. Two dedicated scorekeepers would have greatly improved game play. If the referees didn't have to toggle between screens and were only calling fouls their would have been far fewer missed assists and the like. A close second as far as issues was the pedestal. I think the game would have been better if there was a foul for entering a ball into play before the other was scored, rather than having to depend on a sometimes glitchy pad to pedestal system.

As for 2011, I think the perspective on how annoying the towers were depends on whether your team got short changed. I had two friends whose teams lost a match (or two) that would have left them top 8 in which their minibot clearly reached the top first but was not credited with a score. If your team didn't make eliminations or were eliminated in that way, it would probably make you less favorably inclined to the game as a whole.
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Rookie All-Star Award: 2003 Buckeye
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