[This is long, so I'll bold the important parts.]
I think that the original idea was probably to space the matches apart as far as possible (something my team noted happily), but we didn't appreciate it when, after we complained to the organizers, they handed out "entirely new" match sheets, asking us to rip up our old ones in front of them first, in which the only change was that teams previously listed under "blue alliance" were now under "red alliance." I would rather have been told that there was nothing they could do rather than being tricked. I don't really know what the reasoning behind the new match sheets was, and I don't mean to whine, but it really wasn't very nice.
Also, I think the most important side effect of the new pairing system was stated at the top of page four by Cuog (
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...t=55178&page=4): at Trenton 694 faced 637 for all seven of our matches. 637 was a purely defensive robot, and we formed our match strategies around the fact that we would be defending our strongest cappers against them every match. It didn't help that we were conspiring against them (and probably vice versa) and our pits were right next to each other. I thought that they were a great team with really nice people and I really hope nobody holds any grudges, because I know that there were people on my team that regarded them very aggressively during matches (and vice versa). I feel like the point of these competitions is to make people feel good about their robots, not bad about other robots.
****Most importantly, we should aim to win matches based on the strengths that we built into our machines. We shouldn't have to win them by picking on other robots' weaknesses. We didn't get to cap a tube or deploy our ramps successfully more than once because we had to play defense, and this was what we had built our robot to do.
637 and 694 will see each other in at least one other regional, and I
really hope the algorithm for match selections changes by then.
I think the best and quickest solution would be to revert to last year's algorithm. Perhaps there are pros to the new system, but the cons outweigh them by far. I'd rather have three minutes between my matches than have to spend a year raising money just to face one other team again and again.