Quote:
Originally Posted by martin417
Wow, someone just pointed out this post I made almost a year ago. |
This was certainly true. Our team makes a good example on that for 2009.
In Portland, we were the stongest scoring robot and won all of our quals, so 1st seed made sense.
In Seattle, we lost a few matches, but were still a strong robot, but ended up on the #8 alliance
On Galileo, we were nowhere near the strongest robot, since we had Wildstang, HOT, Exploding Bacon, and many other top teams in our division. We did have a very favorable match schedule, and OPR analysis said we'd be in the top 3. We ended up seeding 2nd. We were 3rd most of the time, with 111 and 67 both having the same W/L/T record, but the Qual points were much higher than ours. The only reason we hit 2nd was because HOT lost a match at the very end.
We had a slight chance at Finals on Galileo (except for sudden technical difficulties and a match stuck on another robot's bumper), but 111's alliance would have thoroughly thrashed us if we had made it that far.
Basically what I'm saying is that I agree with you. The new (to most people) system rewards the strongest scorers that win by the slightest margin possible.
That being said, I would have preferred that the coopertition bonus not be twice the loser's score (just 1x), and the loser's seeding points should have been their own score plus half (or some other fraction) of the winner's score. Then it would never be /more/ beneficial to score for your opponent, but only equally beneficial at best. Then a ball in either goal benefits the winner, but the losing team only wants to score for themselves.
For example (under the 'engunneer rules' just described), if the match is currently R20-B15, Blue wants to score a point the normal way (20-16), because it adds 1 to both seeding scores (R36-B26), whereas if they scored against themselves (21-15), Blue would only get 0.5 of a seeding point, while Red still gets the whole point. (R36-B25.5)
Red /could/ score in either goal, since both give them a seeding point, but they would prefer to score (21-15) because of two reasons: It blocks Blue from 0.5 seeding points, and increases the Spread that Blue needs to score to catch up by 1.
Unfortunately, that removes the incentive for the winner to win by as close a margin as possible. To correct that would probably make the rules pretty complicated (while still making each team want to score the normal way instead of against themselves). Without that incentive, the matches will be blow-outs, which is somehow seems like it would be less exciting to watch.
engunneer rules also include 1 point for a robot entirely within the tunnel at the end of the match
One other scoring thing in the official rules that I agree with - hanging scores just enough to break close games in an exciting fashion, but not so much that you want a robot that only hangs (as opposed to ramp robots as in 2007, which often decided the match no matter what was hanging on the rack.) There are also no crazy multipliers in the game, which always confuses the general public. There is no analogous sport that they can take that experience from. At least now we can describe the hanging as being like an extra point, and suspending as a two point conversion.
That rambled more than expected, sorry.