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They use such horribly complex scoring systems to give the rookies a fighting chance. My guess is that in order to retain teams they want the rookies not to get trounced over and over, so they design the scoring systems to be fairly random.
For instance the LA regional; a team that was broken for every single one of their matches(and when they finally fixed things only functioned poorly) was ranked 4th at the end of the day friday, and through good part of saturday. I think they still wound up in the top 8, though i'm not sure.
On the other hand our robot was functioning very well, and we were dominant in all but one of our matches on friday. At the end i go and check out our ranking, and i'm very surprised not to see us in the first screen (the top 10 or so). So i wait a bit, thinking we must be at least 15th, 15 comes around, and we're not there. I had to wait until the high 30's to see my team number come up.
that's what the "the losers score times the cumulative age of the team divided by pi scoring formulas" are about; giving even the teams who don't do so well a chance to be high ranked. I think this year they over did it because:
A) a robot which was just a box that drove could be competitive in this year's game, and
B)the + 2x loser's score made having a match where no one was dominant very high scoring.
It was to the point where my teammates were jokingly considering dropping our robot off a tall building to break it some, because it might get better while broken.
To finish out this novel of a post I have to say that it is very frustrating for those of us who have built great robots to be outscored by lesser bots, but even so you can understand why FIRST may want to keep it that way
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