Quote:
Originally Posted by martin417
After my second year of involvement with FIRST, I still have the same complaint. I understand that while COOPERTITION is way of FIRST (now trademarked and patented), this is, at its heart, a COMPETITION (otherwise, why keep score?). I understand that it's not about winning, but teams DO want to win the competition. Besides punishing teams for doing well (G14), there is the random, or "luck" factor. If a team works hard, and makes a great robot that meets the goals of the competition better than other teams, they should be rewarded. At every regional I attended, including championships, The seedings did not reflect the ability of the robots or the teams. If FIRST wants this to be a "sport", and be as popular as football, they need to come up with a better way to rank teams prior to alliance pairings. I have no problem with the serpentine draft and the no refusal rules, I see how that can prevent "super alliances", and make scouting important. I do have a problem with some of the best teams not even being in the top 8. Throughout the season, I saw teams that could not score at all ranked as the number one seed, while top scoring bots were not even in the top 10. Perhaps the seeding should be done based on the scoring of the bots rather than a win-loss record.
I don't have all the answers, but the questions remain. As many smart people as there are involved with FIRST, I am confident that they can come up with something better.
|
While I agree that this is a competition, the rest of your statement I must, respectfully, disagree with.
1) <G14> is not a punishment. It is a conditional statement and one that the teams can control. A failure of a team to not control their own scoring, and thus invoke the 2x or 3x condition, just means that that team is not paying attention well enough (with very few exceptions).
2) There is no "no refusal" rule, but there is a "refuse and you cannot be picked again" rule. This rule is strategic in nature.
3) The game is not about scoring. The game is about your alliance having more points than your opponents alliance. Have you ever considered that those 'non-scoring' robots are picking because they make their whole alliance better?
And now back to the thread:
My biggest concern this year was the number of 'redos' and the lack of information getting back to the teams in question as to why they were happening.