[BaysianLogik]

Here are my two cents...

First off, I think there are two different arguements going on here, one on predetermining the winner of a match, and the other about stack agreements. I feel these are two completely different things.

Blatently predetermining the winner of a match eliminates all effort on behalf of one side or the other, and thus violates the spirit of FIRST.

Making an agreement about stacks is a completely different subject. In this game, stacks are extremely vulnerable. In the entire Annapolis regional, I saw a stack successfully defended about 5 times (out of over 100 matches i watched). Thus, if one side takes out the stack, almost every time the other side will be able to take out the stacks as well. Thus, the winner without the stacks would have been the winner with the stacks, because the winner in virtually every match is determined by the number of bins on the floor, or the robots on the ramp.

Take this example, which was a typical scene at the regional:
Human Players on each side put stacks of 4 (most common strategy). After autonomous mode, Blue has 12 bins in their scoring position, while red has 15. 12*4=48, 15*4=60. In order to win, blue takes out reds stacks. In response, red takes out blues. Their scores are reduced to 16 and 19. Attacking the stacks was completely pointless, because blue still lost. All they did was lower both of their scores.

As you can see, the stacks have no weight on who wins a match most of the time, and as such, is a lose-lose strategy.

Lose-Lose situations are avoided in the real world. Companies do not sabatoge each others business (99% of the time), but make their products better so the consumer will buy their services instead of the competetors. In this case, the world as a whole wins, because one company makes better products, and forces its competitors to follow suit, and having the consumer have the best products possible. Furthermore, if the real world did not have a desire to avoid severe lose-lose situations, no one would be reading this right now, because we would have had a nuclear war between the US and USSR years ago, the ultimate lose-lose situation. Mutually Assured Distruction policy was based on this principle, and obviously it worked.

As a project that attempts to have as much of a real world flavor as possible, FIRST is all about not having lose-lose situations. Thus, "Stack Attack," is truely a strange game. The only winning move is not to play by how its name implies. (I hope everyone saw the quote from "War Games")