Quote:
Originally Posted by Bharat Nain
If I were you, I'd pay close attention to Raul's post. Selling your team is a good idea if you do it the right way. And if you try to sell your team by claiming things your robot/team cannot do, most powerhouse teams will find out through their scouting data and it will only lower your teams worth in their opinion. It is important to sell what you have done right in the past rounds so you have a prove record. Honesty is highly valued among teams who are usually in the top 8.
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I agree. When I was scouting captain for team 175, we did a lot of quantitative analysis. However, quantitative analysis is never enough to judge the quality of a team. A lot of the time, it came down to my (and the other scouts) impressions of a team.
It is certainly very important to be honest about what you can do. If you tried to tell me that you could score 5 ringers/match, and my data said that you could only score 2, that would lessen my opinion of your team. However, if your team could score 2 ringers/match because you were a very defensive team and had once held the highest scoring bot at a regional to only 1 ringer, that is going to make a difference to me. The numbers can tell us which robots score 4 ringers a match and which score 1 ringer a match, but it is our impressions of a team and their capabilities that help us decided whether we want to select the robot that scores 3 ringers/match or the robot that scores 3.1 ringers/match.
I agree with others in the thread that it is very important to sell yourself to the right person. Send someone who is knowledgeable about your robot and has seen most of your matches to speak with the scouting captain (or whoever is in charge of picking) about your bot. On one team, talking to the driver may be the best thing to do. On another team, the driver may not have that much input in picking, so talking to them may not help at all.
Selling yourself can definitely be effective. At Chesapeake last year, we were ranked fourth and 1629 was ranked first. From their scouting data, they knew that we had a very strong robot. However, they had not played with us in qualifying and did not know how our robots would do together. From our data, we knew that they had a strong robot and, although they didn't have a the highest scoring average, they did have a very high average. We also felt that their strengths complimented ours. So I and a member of our pit crew went to talk to their driver who was doing the picking. Although he knew that we were a high scoring robot, he was looking for a robot that could also do well defensively. We spoke with him about our defensive capabilities and our two-speed drive (which he was unaware of). This helped to move us up near the front of who they were looking to chose. They did end up choosing us (along with 1184 who we both felt was strong) and the result was a regional win.
So selling yourself can definitely drastically change the outcome of a competition just so long as it is done in the right way to the appropriate person on the other team.