Quote:
Originally Posted by Daniel Brim
The Algorithm
Seriously, FIRST, this has got to go. A lot of people are complaining about it, and rightfully so. In no world should somebody in the top 10 in tube scoring in their division seed 66th (125). Putting a team at a purposeful disadvantage is borderline ridiculous.
This led to other issues as well. To be quite frank, the finals were boring. I miss the days of the 2005/2006 finals, where it was a clash of the titans. The most deserving team got the #1 seed, and then picked who they thought was second best. Now it's normally a random team at #1, who will either pick a begrudging team that deserved to be #1, or will pick several of the best teams, who will decline (Newton 2006, Curie 2007 are examples, although the former didn't have the algorithm of doom).
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I like to think of the sorting algorithms and ranking systems as part of the challenge of the game. Yes, it's entirely possible that a poor performing robot gets lifted up because of their match schedule just as it's entirely possible that a well performing robot will get torn down. I think every team who's been around for a couple years has been on both sides of the fence.
If you are a truly amazing team who is ranked poorly, more often than not people will notice that. If they don't notice it, you can help them by passing out fact sheets to the highly ranked teams. My team did a considerable amount of scouting at the Championship and I can assure you we looked foremost at the robots ability.
You talked about 1114 and 330 rejecting us (1732) in the Curie division. When we picked them we knew full well that they were both going to reject us because they had told us that before the alliance selection. Since we (of course) wanted to win, we decided to make sure those two got split up. Again, it's just part of the strategy of the game.
If FIRST came up with a way of ranking teams from highest to lowest ability in perfect order I think the game would lose an entire dimension of strategy.