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Originally Posted by T. Hoffman
So how is this algorithm benefitting all teams again?
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A match schedule should not benefit "all teams". It should definitely not benefit any team or category of teams in particular. It should benefit the
competition.
The seeding matches are undeniably intended to produce a ranking of teams. It seems reasonable for that rank to reflect how well each team performs, with the better-playing robots at the top of the list. The "perpetual opponent" schedule certainly doesn't give that result. A very good team can be beaten by a marginally better team every time, placing the very good team near the bottom of the list.
Assuming that veterans are "more good" and rookies are "less good" is a shaky thing to do, but let's do it for the sake of argument. Any schedule which intentionally pits veterans against veterans along with rookies against rookies can skew the final rankings to carry a bunch of "less good" robots to the top of the list. And if the assumption
isn't correct, such a schedule serves only to deny teams the opportunity to play against a wide variety of opponents.
I believe that qualification match alliances should be assigned entirely without regard for team age, team number, or prior performance. The goals should be primarily to maximize the number of different teams each team plays against and with, and secondarily to make the time between matches consistently long. There still can't be enough matches to establish a very high correlation between rank and robot "goodness", but it seems to have worked well enough in the past few years.