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Originally Posted by JohnM
I might be wrong, it's been a long time since seeing that contraption, but I thought their robot collapsed on itself to pull them away, maybe same goal.
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Yes.
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Originally Posted by Lil' Lavery in that other thread
First off, the positives your listing are also teams talking about how they feel.
Secondly, the unfortunate reality is that when the source of inspiration comes from working closely with an elite team and/or deep runs in the eliminations, unfortunately that's a zero sum equation. For each team that was picked to cheesecake, a team was left off an elimination alliance. In many cases that team was a very capable team that had a competitive season, but was left off in favor of a bot that presented a better blank slate to add parts to. In other words, they were left off for a less capable team. It's pretty easy to see how being passed over for a less capable team could be disappointing. Disappointment can very well lead to a lack of inspiration.
Does the the benefit of the cheesecaking team outweigh the disappointment of the teams passed over in alliance selection? It's certainly not an easy call to make, but it's not one that should be written off as some trivial matter that can be summed up by air quotes and sarcastic titles.
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Sean, at the risk of causing you to go into a rage (and I hope you don't because you seem like a nice fella)... I don't understand your analysis of the problem. Alliance selections work in mysterious ways. I have seen teams choose numbers at random from people in the audience shouting them as well as teams pick rookie teams who had barely functional robots because they wanted to share the experience.
Let us forget robot modifications for a moment and then let me ask you this. If a team were to choose a less capable alliance partner instead of a more capable team then is that inspirational? What about choosing a team not based on scouting data but based on purely the fact that you like their pants, is that ok? (Go #TeamCrazyPants) What about choosing a team because the mentors know each other really well? What about because the students know each other really well? What about because they paid you to choose them?
Now let's add robot modifications back in. What about choosing a team with a known bad drivetrain that they have to repair before eliminations and you offered to help them or lend them parts? What about choosing a team based on the fact that they are going to put a giant goal blocking sheet on their robot instead of choosing another offensive capable robot because defense suits your strategy?
Just spitballing but perhaps instead of alliance selections we could move to a process by which the serpentine draft just auto assigns teams based on qualification rankings instead of allowing a team's feelings and perception to come into play. Except that qualification rankings could be attributed to match luck. We've all seen some post-turtles turn up in the top 8 at events. So we should probably get rid of qualification matches and then we can judge robots purely on if they can accomplish the tasks that a team built them for. We don't even need events for that, we can all just sit in our labs and build robots in isolation and take videos of them completing the tasks.... Cheesecaking isn't the only slippery slope around here.