Quote:
Originally Posted by New Lightning
Okay if there were only 32 teams, and each captain then selected 3 other robots to be on their alliance then yes everybody is all ready participating and therefore not adding any new teams to the mix. But if you have an event with more than 32 teams, like Cow Town Throw Down this year, then that is when it opens the field to more teams.
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No, it doesn't. Math doesn't lie (it leaves that to abuse of statistics). 8*4=32. Regardless of how many teams are at the event, if 8 alliance captains pick 3 more teams per alliance, there are still only 32 teams in eliminations. End Of Story.
What disallowing inter-top-8 selection does is it creates some incentive to throw a match. If I'm "on the bubble", say in #7, and I want to be picked by the top team, I'm NOT going to want to win my last match in such an event! What this sort of rule does is it creates a "scorched earth" right from the get-go--but it's the sort of "scorched earth" where if you can play the metagame right, you can win HUGE. See Curie 2010, Match 100, only potentially more devastating, to more than one team.
Oh, and it jumbles up exactly which teams are on which alliances in eliminations. Possibly. Depends on scouting and final drafting order.
As for the rest... Let's just say that you've made a lot of assumptions, very few of which are actually the case. Starting with the assumption that the top 8 are always actually the top 8 robots--I'm going to guess that you haven't heard of a couple of cases where a robot that hadn't passed inspection made it into the top 8 via ranking. There's a reason behind the whole "if you play a match with an uninspected robot, your entire alliance gets a red card" rule. And then assuming that the 1/8 and 2/7 matches are always a blowout in favor of the top alliance; I've seen a #8 alliance take a World Championship. As far as real competition-like situations, I show you qual matches and elim matches in the season events, and note that the no-top-8 picking or some variant was in play for precisely one season or less before it was officially scrapped due to teams playing to lose and manipulate the rankings.
Incidentally, IIRC, a "no top 8" rule would have had little to no effect at Fall Classic on Sunday. A "no alliance captain" would have had even less effect. There were only 4 alliances, and as I recall most of the 2nd robots were down a bit more than 4 or 8 or whatever, though not that far down.