I doubt I was the first person to suggest this idea of "collusion" but I'm
beginning to feel responsible for
the debate and anxiety that suggestion has caused. I would like to justify my position on this issue as well as the position of my team.
The original idea was for teams to agree to tie, but that was clearly almost impossible to do, so the concept became something like this: Each alliance builds a stack of four, each alliance takes half of the stacks on the ramp, each alliance gets 2 robots on the ramp. At the very least the loser would get 200 points, a VERY high score even for a winner, and the winner would get 600+ points, which is downright insane. All four teams would benefit.
The best analogy here is not to a boxer "taking a dive" but to the practice of "drafting" in NASCAR
See this link.
Clearly it would be bad for the competition and for the teams to use this in every match. Competition inspires innovation, and competition is a hell of a lot more fun to watch than "cooperation"
I was surprised at the overwhelmingly negative reaction to this idea. I had even (brielfy) entertained the fantasy that FIRST intended to teach us a lesson about cooperation by making cooperation an essential point of this years game. I hadn't really thought that cooperating would be such a bad thing, so I asked FIRST, their answer was quick and brutal, yes, "collusion" violates the principle of Gracious Professionalism and the "spirit of FIRST"
That decision having been made I abandoned the idea of "collusion" in FIRST as anything more than an interesting thought experiment. In FIRST, if not always in life, the result is not as important as how you played the game. Nobody on my team (782) was willing to sacrifice our reputation, much less our pride in the way we played, for points.
We didn't use this strategy once in the New England regional and we came our the #1 seed, with two absolutely amazing alliance partners (236 & 157) we ended up winning the regional and it was a hell of a lot of fun. If we had decided to use the "collusion" strategy we may well have had to sacrifice everything sweet about that outcome.
I'm sorry to hear what happened in AZ, if either myself, or my team is responsible I am deeply sorry.