Quote:
Originally Posted by EricH
My first paragraph should probably be taken as "We didn't have enough teams. You apparently didn't even look at the other set of data from the same event. Are you guys going to sit at home and say 'you guys are doing it wrong' and NOT come down here next year to show us how you think it should be done?" Meanwhile it seems like most of the commentary has been "It seems like these teams/this event did it wrong" vs "It's how they want to play, let 'em play that way!"
I don't necessarily agree that it's not beneficial to ally with your own team's B robot. It can be quite beneficial, in terms of winning the event (and all the effects of winning an offseason event), assuming that that actually happens, due to having not one but two of the X robots on the alliance being controlled by good friends. I see it as little different than two collaborating teams with the same robot running on the same alliance. You could (at 4-team-alliance events) sit one of the two and end up with one perfectly good robot and one spare robot that can equal it if necessary. There are some other decent reasons, most likely, and I'm sure there are some negatives too, but each team at the offseason that has a twin robot has to make that decision. (In this case, including the team that ran two robots as well as supplying most of the volunteers!)
As far as the GP/non-GP: Usually, if someone comes out and says "That's un-GP", they're complaining about a legal strategy that they just happen not to like, or something similar, and often have adjusted it to fit their own definition. 9/10 times, there is no real way to call "un-GP" on a situation without showing up as being the opposite of GP yourself. But very rarely, there is that one time. This might be that time, it might not be.
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I'm not quite following your argument, but I think that I'm getting from you that if picking your own robot to win the competition is the best strategy we should be able to do it. And I am generally disagreeing. That off season competition was not at the level of IRI or Chezy Champs in prestige, and having 2 separate days of competition clearly diluted it even further.
As a competitive athlete, I knew when certain competitions were very important, and other ones where I could work on different strategies or work with my teammates or even friends to improve their competitive outcomes. Not every "competition" is of the same importance or consequences. Rarely are off season events of significant importance, and never of the same consequence as a Regional or District.
Because backing from the competitive fires requires mutual agreement among all of the teams--it can't be instituted by a team on their own for very obvious reasons--the event organizers need to dictate the tone of the competition.
At the Fall Classic, two alliances on Sunday had dual team robots. Why couldn't they have swapped in some manner? Teams are missing the entire point of the FRC alliance structure if they think that all of the benefits need to accrue within a single team playing among "good friends." Why can't you have "good friends" on other teams? We most certainly would rather play with other teams than with ourselves. I honestly don't see any pluses of playing together within our own team vs learning even more about alliance management with other teams (and having 2 drive teams learning similar lessons). You do NOT learn alliance management if you have 2 robots from the same team. (And why not double the chance that you'll be on an winning alliance by splitting your team?) Alliance management has been critical to our recent success--maybe the single most important one.
And your right, most of the commentary has been contrary to how it played out. That's the point of this post. Regardless of the shortage of teams, it could have been managed better.
And more more importantly, we can hope that other off season events think more explicitly about this issue.