[sw293]

We use the manual loader, because it's better. All the best teams that I have seen prefer the manual loader. But the auto loader has its advantages in the elimination rounds.

During the seeding rounds, using the auto loader heavily tends to be a disadvantage to most teams that do it. It is usually either slower or more risky, and tends to have a higher rate of failure in obtaining a tetra.

However, for the elimination rounds, in which efficient offense is king, three good robots can't all use the human load zone efficiently, especially when they have to cap goals on the auto loader side. So in alliance selection, team 293 looks to choose one robot that can use the auto loader or pick tetras off the ground.

When we picked in Philly, we chose 358 with our first pick, who mostly used the human loader. Our second pick was 834, because they could use the auto loader and pick tetras off the ground. We actually had them ranked 5th (I believe) on our pick sheet, even though they were in 35th place overall and there were several bots with better capping averages. Our alliance was one of the best coordinated I've ever seen. We beat the 8 seed in two games, then the one seed in two games, and we came close to winning the regional.