Quote:
Originally Posted by Loose Screw
Playing with two "toasters" is always hard to carry. However, unless they are directly interfering with your robot, they should not affect how many points your robot can put out. For example, look at 1114 and other "powerhouse" teams, and compare that to last year.
Last year if you were placed with two "toasters", the other alliance could focus your robot and easily outscore you, resulting in the same amount of QP as the two "toasters".
With this year though, if your two alliance partners can't score, their average scores will show that. Likewise, if you can consistantly put out X amount of points, your average will show for it. For example, two "toasters" get placed with 1114. Sure their average score will get a boost, but because it's only for one match it won't matter in the long term. For 1114 though, even though they didn't score as many points as they could have, they still scored what their robot could put out, so their average won't be dropped that much.
The only robots that are affected by alliance partners are the robots that focus primarily on the RC. They could steal all 4 RC in auto and be able to cap 7 6-stacks, but that doesn't matter if their partners can't make them. That is a risk that I can imagine they took into account when they were designing their robot. Those robots, however, will do very well in high levels of play when their partners can easily spit out 6-stacks.
TL;DR
Average score > Win/Loss
RC bots struggle with Quals, but will kill in Finals.
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While I agree with you in theory [1] in practice it doesn't quite work out. I watched a robot actively play defense on their partner in a few matches last weekend and it definitely hurt their average score. This robot was a toaster in the biggest sense of the word (incapable of scoring a point) and was simply getting in the way. It didn't help that they were ~4' long and had almost 0 control of their robot.
As for why my simulations didn't see it? Because I didn't want to deal with the flak for saying that, on average, probably 15-20% of teams are actually worth NEGATIVE points in that they do little more than get in the way of scoring robots.
[1]
http://beyondinspection.org/post/108...-visualization