[Brian Maher]

Originally Posted by lovelj

In a nutshell, was ranking a poor metric of performance this year, more so than other years? I don't recall so many low raked teams being picked so early compared to prior years. What was it about this year's game that skewed ranking from individual performance?

I may have had bad luck, but this season I noticed many more robots losing communication and browning out. I believe this plays a big role in this ranking phenomenon. In addition to a win being much harder to attain with two robots, the ranking point from a capture can almost impossible to obtain, depending on where the robot fails (unless you have the crazy pushing power of 25).

On Archimedes, one of our driver's controllers failed during our match with 1986 and 4183, rendering us immobile for the entirety of teleop. While they and our other partner still won us the match, we could not complete a capture. With that extra RP, 1986 would be ranked 13th rather than 16th and 4183 would be 25th instead of 29th. These are small differences for non-picking teams at a 7 team event, but they reflect the impact of failing partners.

On the flip side, one of our partners was a no-show and another lost comms at the beginning of the match. We lost both matches by less than ten points, and even with towers weakened to 0, could not capture. Those almost four RP matches became 1 RP matches. This is a six ranking point difference, which on Archimedes was the difference between ranking 20th and 50th, 10th and 34th, or 1st and 10th.


I've shared 1257's anecdote about not picking based on ranked before. I've quoted it below:

Originally Posted by BMSOTM

The issue with using qualification rank to assess team strength is that strength of schedule and luck with alliance partners can bias results. Just last weekend, 1257 seeded 52nd of 60 teams at MAR CMP. We averaged of five low goals in a match, and maximum of seven, but had bad luck in quals with alliance partners losing comms and such. 225 (who told me their scouting does not consider qualification rank) and 341 picked us for what we could do, and we won the event.