[Donut]

Originally Posted by Lil' Lavery

Quick note of clarification first off. There has been a HUGE discussion over how to determine QPs, when in reality you were discussing RPs. Qualification Points (QPs) were determined in 2006 by 2 points for a win, 1 for a tie, and 0 for a loss. RANKING Points (RPs) were the adverage score of the losing alliance in matches you participated in.
I don't really think this system is broken. I think it works very well, in fact. W/L/T should be the primary factor. RP serves both as a measure of "schedule strength" and GP.
The problem with using your opponent's W/L/T as a Strength of Schedule is that it doesn't rank how strong they were in the particular match you faced them in, but rather how strong they were over the entire competition. For example, say Team 9999 has a 9-1 record, but you faced them in their only loss, when they had a malfunction and their robot never moved. With a "power ranking" system, it would reward you for beating a team that was a top notch team, but in reality you beat a team that never even moved. With the current RP system, you would likley receive a lower RP because they didn't actually score points. Another situation may be when you face excellent teams that don't work well together as an alliance. Like a combination of 3 herders (where you could simply block the corner goals all match), or (in 2004) two cappers with not so hot human players.
In short, if you wanted to modify the system to have more emphasis on schedule strength, you have to use a system that uses strength in the matches you competed in, not overall competition strength.

The herder scenario would be another problem with the power-point rankings. They weren't designed for alliance competitions, and so probably wouldn't be as effective.

The current system has little problems. It does discourage defense to an extent; but this keeps teams from putting the same robot on the field year after year that is designed simply to push people around and get in their way. Since the FIRST rankings only determine who are alliance captains, not who is ultimately in the playoffs, they should be designed to promote what FIRST wants us to do, and it should be up to the teams to figure out their way to determine who are the best teams to pick.

Since this thread is about designing a better system for truly ranking teams, I will continue to develop my idea, though I hope FIRST won't actually use it.