Quote:
Originally Posted by Kevin Leonard
I agree with you for the most part about this topic being way off base.
However, there is an argument for not caring about seeding highly to compete at the highest levels of play. Let's say you're a low resource team in 2012 who wants to compete with the best. Should you attempt to build a top-tier scorer so you can maybe seed (even though that was NOT an easy thing to do that year), or should you build a wide feeder bot in hopes of being a desirable third robot.
For teams looking to compete at any level, priorities could be different than yours or mine.
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You build 4334 and win your division and IRI. (
and also the coopertition award at your regional and your division).
ATA identified the highest level of competition and built a tiny robot that could steal balls and make it so two long robots could triple balance. They did this with a robot made mostly out of 80-20. I also want to point out that they
seeded pretty well: 13th at GTRE and 16th on a really deep Archimedes field. For all intents and purposes, they tried their best to control their fate (which is pretty admirable for a robot that couldn't score any balls).
This case study just shows that it's possible to: analyze the game to identify the highest level of competition, realize you can't be a "main" robot at that level, identify a niche on the ideal alliance, build for that niche, while also not sacrificing seeding ability. 4334 built a simple robot that seeded a lot higher than plenty of ball-scoring robots, because they figured the game out.