[Ben Martin]

For Quals, you have to be OK with whatever impressions of your team are given during the negotiation, as the drive team is the most highly visible window into the attitude of other teams. We DNP teams that are prohibitively difficult for us to work with, and we expect others will do the same if they feel they can't work with us (so we try to mitigate that impression as much as possible, while still trying to optimize the match for both our performance and the rankings).

Bad blood develops when two teams want to do the same thing and can't, and fortunately this year was easier than most for multiple teams to score at the same time. Pre-match negotiations for Quals went very smoothly as a whole this year (at least for us).

It's in your best interest to have your partners do the thing they will be best at if it makes sense with the match flow, since that will likely result in a higher score and more RP overall.

For elims, we're usually a lot more aggressive about pushing the strategies we believe are correct. Everyone on your alliance should have the same goal at that point, and if they don't, you probably want to avoid picking them in the first place.