[tindleroot]

Originally Posted by itsjustjon

Plus, scouting one side might mean you only get to see a robot once throughout a competition, and that's it.

While that is technically possible, it is extremely unlikely that you will not see about half of a team's matches if you only looked at one alliance. This is because the final step of the matchmaking algorithm is to swap the alliances' colors in matches in order to balance the number of red and blue matches for each team.

Scouting only half the teams in a match will have the negative consequence of having half of a sample size, though with limited scouting this is inevitable. However, you should expect data to be skewed if you scout one color only since the two sides of the field will usually have small flaws. This means that, for example, a shooting robot might play less than average on the blue side due to a defect in the goal sizes. However, other types of robots will not suffer the same issues, and you will have skewed data. You should not scout a particular alliance for that reason.