Quote:
Originally Posted by inkling16
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).
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Let's make that two teams: We did exactly the same thing as 254, independently. Our team also went to help teams that we were going to play with on the Newton field. We went to their pits on Wed and worked with them so that they could play at a higher level for the ENTIRE competition. (We helped 1114 who also was teamed with them in a match.) We continued to help them after they played with us. (And it was a ton of fun!
) Notably, both 254 and us were the alliance captains in the Einstein final.
Quote:
Originally Posted by inkling16
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.
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The issue you're discussing about whether robots are opponents or alliance mates was discussed extensively earlier in the thread, so I'll refer you there in part. However, I'll tell you as the lead scouting mentor that having poor performing alliance mates was a bigger penalty than the gain of competing against poor performing robots. The fact is that you can have more control over how your alliance mates perform than over your opponents. Our drive coach was most frustrated by poor performing robots and felt is job was easier with those that were up to snuff. So you can't look at this as simple probability problem--it's actually a weighted expected outcome gain. The value of added performance by your allies is greater than the risk of loss from your opponents. I think most of the stronger teams recognize this situation.
One additional factor you haven't mentioned--it provides a deeper pool of prospects for the elimination rounds. The top teams are more likely to be choosing among the lower quality robots given the snake draft. Having a larger pool of better robots, especially at districts and smaller regionals, makes that job much easier (speaking for experience). We took a rookie team to Einstein, so we have a pretty broad scope of who we are looking at. So you need to look at more than just the quals rounds.