[Caleb Sykes]

Originally Posted by BrennanB

How many times have one of the first two picks at a regional been a sub 40/very low ranked team? I bet you couldn't find 5 examples in the last 10 years of that happening.

Defining "very low ranked" to be in the bottom third of teams at the event:
418 at Arkansas 2014
973 at Central Valley 2014
1796 at New York City 2014
1287 at North Carolina 2014
3986 at Montreal 2014

This is really beside the point though, I never claimed this to be a common occurrence. I made up an example to prove a point. I knew this was not a common occurence, but was just providing a statement which indicated lack of knowledge of the drawbacks of the ranking system.

Sure lots of people do the "We were ranked high but didn't get picked" card, which yes it's true. However people don't use rankings to the same degree as OPR numbers for global comparison. People (several examples even today within the last few hours) on chief compare teams based on OPR values that didn't attend the same event. People never say "I was rank 5 at xxx regional you were rank 6 at yyyy regional, I must be better" However that happens with OPR all the time.

Awesome, comparing OPRs between events is a useful thing to do. I don't really understand your point here. If you are saying that teams should be comparing ranks instead of OPRs that is silly, OPRs clearly trend better with future competitive success than ranks do, and I can prove it if I need to do so, but I thought that this was common knowledge. If you are saying that the statement "My OPR was 32 and yours was 31 therefore my robot must be better than yours" is silly, you are correct. That is a silly thing to say because absolute statements are always false. Statements like that don't make OPR any less valuable though.

Secondly it's all good and fine to complain about things, but when you don't present a better solution to the problem what is the point? The problem with OPR is some people consider it as the law, and don't understand at all where it comes from or how it is calculated or what it's limitations are. The solution is to use it as a guidline, and watch the actual matches before you go around making conclusions.

My issue really isn't with the ranking systems (well, I do have issues with FIRST's ranking systems, see below), my issue is that lots of people assume that the ranking does a good job of sorting teams. Just like you seem to have issue with people who use OPR without understanding its limitations, I have issue with people who use rankings less than 16** for things other than for the alliance selection process, and people who use rankings over 15 at all**. If someone really wants to know how they stack up to other teams at their event, and don't have a scouting database handy, they shouldn't even think about using rank instead of OPR.

So your problem is the ranking system isn't good enough to your satisfaction, and your solution is...?

This is getting off from the point a bit, but I'll answer anyway. The best solution is to get more matches in with fewer teams at an event. The next big improvement would be for FIRST to quit using screwy ranking algorithms* and just do WLT with cumulative auto points as the second sort. Finally, as a competitor, I would love it if FIRST used a modified Elo rating system to determine ranks. However, an optimized system would likely be too confusing to easily explain to outsiders, so I wouldn't want it.

That's all just things to think about the two differences between rankings and OPR and why people are more vocal about OPR. There isn't a solution to the rankings problem (aside from playing an infinite number of matches) that will properly sort the teams based on ability. There may be a better solution, but nothing will be perfect.

People should be more vocal about OPR than rank because OPR is a much better metric than rank.

Look, I don't want to be the defender of OPR. OPR has some very clear limitations that many people do not realize. OPR is just a tool, it doesn't fit every situation, but it certainly has uses. If some people don't want OPR in their metaphorical toolbox, that is fine, there are many other tools. However, if I see anyone that has rank in their toolbox and not OPR, I will try to convince them to use OPR. Hopefully someday every match at every event will be archived and teams will publicly share their scouting databases, and OPR will become obsolete. Until then, I will always use OPR to compare performance at events.


*2015 was a bit of an exception. Although it does fall under the "screwy ranking algorithms" umbrella, the average score system did a much better job than WLT for sorting teams, but then we had to have coopertition also, which just ruined it.

**For anything other than calculating points in a district system.