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Originally Posted by Peter Matteson
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.
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I'm still thinking more about options that are better than the serpentine, but I have to say that your post has made me get off the fence with respect to using the average loser's score as a possible means to determine second round draft order. I am now
more fond of the idea.
Putting reality aside for a minute here:
One could find it reasonable to assume that a win of 98 - 4 was probably "easier" to come by than a win of 98 - 75. That is, one could say that the alliance that scored 75 points was probably stronger and more of a challenge than the 4 point scoring alliance. Now, there is a match that ends with a score of 5 - 4. While the winning alliance did less "damage" to get their win, one would have to say that the strength of their opponents was probably not much greater than the strength of the losing alliance in the 98 - 4 match. So, the average loser's score may tend to represent the strength of the alliances a given team has gone up against?
Now, to snap back to reality, one of the problems I see is that a team winning 98 - 4, would probably have been able to win 98 - 75, or 98 - 97, had their opponents risen to the challenge (not necessarily, of course), while a win of 5-4 doesn't get much closer. Anyway, to not ramble, it seems like the one measure better than the strength of the schedule is the strength of a given alliance, which could be measured by their winning score? Sure, but just look again at two examples mentioned above: 98 - 4 and 98 - 75. You could argue that (in general) the two 98's are equal, but who had the harder time getting to 98? Maybe the 98 - 4, because the weaker alliance probably played alot of defense? Or maybe it was the 98 - 75 alliance, because there was a better mix of offense/defense throughout (with the 98 scoring alliance playing defense every once in a while, then scoring, rather than focusing solely on trying to score). Maybe the 98 - 75 alliance would have scored a bit more points, if there opponents were as weak as the 98 - 4 losing alliance. I'm making assumptions (and not even considering scoring for the opponents, etc), but do you see what I'm getting at here? Maybe its time I look at data from the elimination rounds, where the strength of a given alliance tends not to change, while the strength of their opponent does (with the progression from the quarterfinals to the semifinals to the finals). Maybe there are some trends there.
I don't know.. as I said before, I'm getting more fond of using the loser's score.. what are the strong reasons against my line of thinking? What am I missing here?
I really hate the serpentine!