[Alpha 997]

Originally Posted by geowasp

I love the responses I'm getting, kudos to the CD community out there, but I still have one huge dillema with "selling" our own team:
the draft system is built the way it is for a reason, if my team tries to "sell" our team to another team that might've picked a better robot, we are simply screwing that alliance over. Maybe from my perspective, our robot was great, and in our "selling" process, it also sounds great, but is it a fact? I don't want to sway a team from possibly picking a more worthy candidate. If we were to enter eliminations, and my team performs worse than a robot that was not picked (but might've been the original decision of a alliance captain), i would feel horrible if this was a result of our "schomoozing" up to the alliance captain. I believed in the system, in that if you have a good robot worthy of eliminations, it would be picked. Maybe the one or 2 teams had bad scouting, and we fell through, but there were potentially, 16 team captains (for the second pick) up there with their lists, it is hard for me to believe that our robot's performance fell through the cracks for all 16 teams. We are not used car salesmen, and I still feel like the performance of a robot is best judged from a unbiased point of view, void of inputs from the teams that are being chosen. In addition, i felt like the SHARC team's booklet on the teams at the CO regional spoiled the chances for a good team ranked low to be picked. The booklet did not include actual performance of each team, and only the specs. specs can look good on paper, and when a team did not have good scouting, they simply relied on the booklet. It was obvious that the 8th alliance captain at CO just flipped through that book for his selections, maybe he had notes written in there, but it was clear that he had no clear choices (as he let the 7th alliance captain make their 2nd round pick before him). While I believe this kind of booklet was produced in goodwill by team SHARC, and I welcome their efforts to ease scouting, I believe it is each team's responsibility to still scout, and base their opinion each robot on their own data.

I agree. It is a team’s responsibility to have a good scouting system if they are a good team and is going to pick. And yes, good teams have their own systems that show them which robot best compliment their own robot. We had a lifter so we were not looking for lifters, no matter now good they are. So many people tried to sell themselves to us at PNW it got a little awkward. And I just try to tell them that we have a scouting system that will make them stand out if their robot fits us. Out scouting team takes the data of every match and makes comments about each robot so that we have complete statistics and feature for every single robot in the regional (It really doesn’t take much. All you need is 6 students to take data and a couple to enter and organize the data. You do need a complete spreadsheet ahead of time though.). We then factor the areas that compliment us such as ring scoring and ability to climb and rank them in our own list. That list is completely independent of the matches rank. I know what you mean about bias in selection and I believe that our system minimizes bias opinions.