[Peter Matteson]

Originally Posted by Joel J.

I was thinking about the serpentine system that I hate so much.. and started to wonder about the feasibility of using qualifying points (W-L-T) to determine the draft order in the first round, and then ranking points (32.28938) to determine draft order in the second round. I don't know whether it would be the RP of the alliance captain, average RP, or max RP between the two current alliance members that would be used to rank the alliances for the second round of the draft, but either way. I'm not sure about this idea, but I thought I'd mention it here.. That method of determining draft positions wouldn't really mess with the draft currency idea suggested above (warming up to the idea), as they still have to select in some order.

Interesting idea, because since we went to the current seeding system in 2004 these items have been somewhat at odds with each other. Just winning is the most important item in seeding because you get the QP for that. When you tie and it goes to the tie breaker of opposing score it would say you want a high opponents score but letting them score a lot can bite you with a penalty. So you don't want the score to be too close. Frankly I've never been a fan of using opposing score in rankings because to much involved is beyond the control of your own team/alliance, i.e. no robots for the opposing alliance show up, none of them work, and if you strategy is based on keeping the total score low in your matches it hurts you. Remember in 2003 the best robots didn't qualify well because they kept the score low (I know it was a different qualifying system but the logic still applies), a similar situation can keep a better team out of the top qualifying spot. The current ranking system has favored pure offense to "managing" or "controlling" the game.

In short I like the idea of using something else to determine the second round picking order if you want to mix things up just don't use opponents score. I would prefer it if they want to limit purely defensive play and mix things up to use lowest average scoring differential rather than average opponents score.

P.S. I'm intentionally being contrarian to the game designers intent of keeping the games highly offense based for the last 3 years. I believe low scoring doesn't mean a defensive battle all the time, it can mean efficient control of the field by an alliance.