Quote:
Originally Posted by philso
A large percentage of the teams are aiming to be low bar capable robots. There is little doubt that being low bar-capable places severe restrictions on the design of the robot and how effective it will be on the competition field. There is always a group of highly effective robots, a group of moderately effective robots and a group of robots with low effectiveness. I suspect that the design limitations of being low bar-capable will make the majority of the middle group much less effective than they have been in past years. In other words, there is likely to be a greater gap between the top group and the other groups and the differences between robots in the two less effective groups will be smaller. This will make alliance selection more difficult than in other years since it is likely that a very high percentage of the pool of robots that can be selected will "suck" (as Andrew suggested in Joe Johnson's thread about what scares Karthik) with few positive attributes to differentiate them. In essence, it may turn alliance selection into a roll of the dice. I am hoping that ours will not be one of the ones that proves Andrew right.
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I tend to disagree. Last year had the biggest gap between the top bots and the next level because of the multiplier effect of the cans. (A problem that could have been fixed easily by the GDC by scoring the tote stacks to actually reward stacking vs moving totes.) I've posted a comparison of OPR distributions in the white papers.
This year is more like the 2012/13 games in terms of the distribution of teams' performances. The difference between the low and high goal scores are small and the final reward is equal. I think most teams will be able to surmount more than half of the defenses so they can contribute to the breach. And defense again is playing a role. The teams playing defense will have a visual advantage over offensive bots with the large number of obstacles.