Quote:
Originally Posted by StephLee
Last year, a single good shooting robot could usually win a match by itself if paired against less-than-great opponents; 7 balls in a match plus one robot on the ramp would negate the ramp bonus of all three opponents. We ended up in such a situation last year quite frequently: all our opponents and partners in the qualifiers had about the same scoring capability, and we knew we could outscore most of them (with a little defensive help from our partners, of course). This year, however, one good scoring robot is hard-pressed to beat an entirely defensive opposing alliance if that alliance has a set of 12-inch lifts, especially if the scoring robot has partners that are only partly working during that match - or ones that can't make it to the field for whatever reason.
The point of all that? I'd personally like to see the GDC make it easier again for one good scorer to outlast an alliance of "non-scorers" (meaning robots that can't score anything but bonus). While bonus is obviously incredibly important this year, it also isn't possible for one robot to score bonus alone. If one robot can make up for "deficiencies" in alliance partners, individual rankings might better reflect the individual robot's capabilities without taking away the partnership aspect of the game.
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Steph,
Since you have taken the exact opposite of my position, I'll comment briefly. Team 57 is a defensive team. We looked at the game this year and saw from the beginning that a good defensive alliance could take on most everything except a massive scoring alliance. We specifically chose defense and lifting as our strategy. Implying that our team is somehow doing the wrong thing by analyzing the game and apparently coming up with a good strategy... Implying that upsets me. Defensive teams can be bitten by bad alliance partners just as easily as you. Most of our alliances had few problems holding the other team to low scores, but we often had teams that couldn't climb our ramps, both from driving and sheer physical impossibility. Perhaps you're more upset with the pairing algorithm this year or something, but I stand by my point. Sometimes defense is the smart move, and teams usually go for the smart strategy.