[tindleroot]

Originally Posted by Richard Wallace

TBA Insights indicate a very high level of play at Tippecanoe, particularly the 44% Capture rate in eliminations. Also, low success rate (13%) on Sally indicates the refs were having trouble seeing clearance on solo attempts. I was reffing at St. Joe, where we used hand signals between courtyard and outer works refs to confirm door clearance on solo Sally attempts, and our success rate (54%) may be due to that. Hopefully refs will sees all the crossings better as the season progresses.

There were many 4/5 breaches occurring in qualification matches (with the Class C defense ignored often) due in part to, I think, the low margin of error between capturing and not capturing in quals. Many alliances had the potential to capture in qualifications, even if they didn't have one of the big shooters, but in order to do so they would have to hurry to score enough boulders. Due to this, most alliances completely ignored the 5th defense once the breach had occurred.

My conjecture is that as the probability for successful capture approaches some constant c, the probability of breaking all 5 defenses (as opposed to only 4) decreases significantly. The level of play at Tippecanoe was around this point where going for the last defense was unnecessary for the win, and would have cost alliances a chance for the capture.

It's apparent that the lights at the front of defenses and on the side of the tower are intended to be signals of the field's state to drivers, but most of those lights are in a spot with poor visibility, plus many of them seem to either not work or are delayed during a match. FIRST is hopefully working on devising a better system than that. I noticed during this past weekend that the blue alliance had a tremendous advantage in that they were able to view the big screen right behind them in order to see tower and defense strengths and match time easily, while red alliance would struggle to see the screen due to the blue tower being in the way.