[Caleb Sykes]

Originally Posted by RunawayEngineer

The "whatever reason" is poor scouting. In my experience, any team that significantly contributes will be noticed by the teams with solid scouting and good match strategy.

I would probably chalk up the "whatever" reason to be some combination of poor scouting, poor strategy, poor communication between drive team and scouting team, and the human tendency to judge things based on how they appear on the outside.

I think making a robot that forgoes "primary" tasks and does other tasks well is a great build strategy.

I think it tends to be a good strategy as well, however you have to hedge your bets. Teams like 5288 should have been snapped up for elims at every event, and they were by the 2-3 teams at every event that recognized their capabilities. Unfortunately though, there just aren't enough teams that make this decision out there, which means that lower-ability teams have to hedge their bets if they want a solid chance to make it into elims. I would have loved to have my team make a robot like 5288's, but I don't have enough faith in other teams' scouts to do this. So instead, we added in some other functionality to our robot. I guess the distinction that I am making here is that the MCC for elims would be 5288, but unfortunately you might not make it to elims with this design, so maybe the abilities of the MCC need to be a bit higher.

You will probably be ignored by the captains with poor scouting (whom you generally don't want to partner with anyway) and you can be noticed by the ones that scout and pick strategically.

I would rather make the elims with a partner who I don't want than not make elims at all.

And you can always make sure you are noticed by talking to the teams that will be in a position to pick. I have been on a high seeded team a number of times - never once did I have a team come to me to discuss their value as a 3rd partner. Any team that would commit to working with our strategy and could demonstrate their ability to do it would leap up my pick list.

I've had a couple of cases where teams try to "sell themselves" to my team before the elims, but I agree that the prevalence is far lower than it should be.