[Waynep]

Originally Posted by mtaman02

I don't ever think this match generator is going to be disseappearing anytime soon. Personally at the NYC regionals the matches were fairly random and so were the alliances. It made the event a little bit more exciting to see different alliances. Personally I like the randomness an event has. It gives teams a chance to change stratedgy to compensate for what they don't have. If anything the amount of robots on the field will be extremely more competitive, the only problem is the day would have to be extended or the time in between matches would have to be shortened so that each team can play all the scenarios.

Any thoughts ?

I disagree with you on this one and I know a couple of the other top teams will agree with me on this. We played at Pittsburgh with only 24 teams and saw far more randomness than at NYC. We wound up playing with teams 3+ times either allied or against, and others none. Sometimes allied twice and then agains once, or vice versa. There were some teams that we never played with on a field. This could be great for some teams, but horrible for others depending on the alliance strength. Furthermore, this throws the "Random Generator" Factor into seeding for some of the teams. Top performers should stay on top, but there were some non-scoring bots and sometimes non-driving bots that made the top 8 due to their alliance partners performance. The Master Puppeteer Theory is something we partially believe, our first 2 matches were against 375, NJ #2 Seed, and our Regional Championship Alliance partner 2 years in a row. I'm in agreement with the other engineers/mentors, at smaller Regionals space the matches out further, even if it means playing fewer matches we should play at least all of the teams once.
Best,
Wayne