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Unread 26-04-2005, 10:17
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Re: [Official 2005 Game Design] Radical Tournament Ideas

Quote:
Originally Posted by dlavery
This thread is a spin-off of this discussion, and has been started to focus on radical tournament structure changes. This thread is intended to collect innovative ways to structure tournament play. Using previous years as an example, this might include ideas to add human players to a robot-only format, or to change the three robots playing at once to a two-team alliance format. Like the above thread, this thread is meant to collect creative ideas that can be applied to any game concept.

-dave
I agree with the promotion of offense over defense, especially to control the battle-bots approach to the game. I also agree with the single objective game (and I love the 3 on 3 game format). The conflicts I had this year were (1) the use of penalties of the means of promoting offense and (2) the single objective was clearly out of reach for some teams, creating a huge disparity in the quality of teams and, therefore, game play (while also very frustrating to under-resourced teams who want to put a capable bot on the field but lack the means to do so). I have two thoughts that are attempts to address these areas.

To address (1), I have been working on how to replace penalties with a more progressive form of promoting offense. I wanted to come up with a reward for offense that was very observable, very valuable to a team, and fairly easy to manage. Here is the thought I am working on. At the end of the match, the number of objects scored by the two alliances are totaled. (This year, the number of tetras placed on top of a goal would have been counted). Each team would be awarded the total count for both alliances in points, similar to ranking points, only it is the count of objects instead of score that is considered. Before the start of the match, the average points would be calculated for each alliance. Following autonomous mode (assuming there is an autonomous mode and it remains at the beginning of the match), the team with the greater average number of points gets a five-second head start. The robots on the team with the lesser average are disabled until five seconds of match play have expired (imagine the anxiety it would create for the team sitting and waiting. Talk about incentive). For the first match, as all teams have no points, all teams start at the same time. So long as at least one team has played one match, the average would be calculated by dividing total points by the number of teams considered in that total (excluding those that have not yet played a match). This point average would be considered right through the tournaments, which would mean that the total points for a given team might be worth considering in the draft. This would promote a very offense-oriented tournament and could make it easier for teams to form draft boards (teams that used rankings to form their draft boards were typically crushed in the tournaments, as the rankings have as much to do with luck of the alliance draw as robot ability. The current model favors teams with experience). It would also have the fun side-effect of allowing FIRST to keep track of the total objects scored, a fun statistic to report at the end of each event and compare across regionals and national divisions. Imagine what the sum total might be if you added all the tetras placed for every match played this year.

My thought on addressing (2) while staying with the single objective model is to add an ADA approach to the solution. For people with disabilities, the ADA provides laws that require organizations to provide alternative means of access for a given objective, say, accessing a building normally entered via a stairway. That mechanism is often less efficient than that which is available to people who do not have the physical limitation (long ramps or elevators). Taking this thought and applying it to a game, what if three of this year's goals were replaced by a single-width ramp or platform that would allow a team that did not have the means to construct a safe and efficient lifting mechanism to drive up the ramp and place tetras on top of a goal (it really wouldn't have worked very well for this years game, I merely use this year's game for illustration purposes)? Access to the ramp could be restricted to one robot at a time, which would control the king-of-the-mountain problem and create enough inefficiency to really drive teams to elevate the objects using on-board lift mechanisms, yet give under-resourced teams approachable access to the main objective. It would also lift up the smaller robots during the games so they are more visible to the crowd, creating more visual appeal and excitement for those teams who choose to use it.

I think when all is said and done, the tournaments would favor machines that could elevate the object of the game, just as most people use the stairs, but it would at least make the game approachable and be a great message. Additionally, given the size of some of the smaller regionals, you might find some of the teams who couldn't build a lifting mechanism drafted and competing more effectively. In this year's game, for instance, the under-resourced team could have capped the winning goal. Serious cool points.