[Kims Robot]

So I gave myself some time to sit on this before even opening Chief Delphi...

We knew the seeding system well coming into competition. Im not certain all of our kids were convinced of it, but I ran all the numbers early in the season (like many teams did) and caught the whole "it doesnt pay to play defense" thing. I also noted how the bizzare 6vs0 could play out.

That said, I will admit we started the day with a less than optimal robot, but wanted to win...
First Match: Played to win, but it was the second match of the day, results 2:1, ehh...
Second Match: Played to win, but got completely annihilated, 9:0 after penalties!! This match vaulted us into somewhere around third place!! Half the team was dumbfounded, how could we lose, but go up in ranks!! They finally caught on...

Next two matches, played to win, won one, lost one... ugh heavy defense!

We looked at our next match and by all of our scouting data, there was no way for us to win. So we decided to give the "help your opponent" strategy a try. We intended to block our goals with 2 robots, and use our middle bot to feed the opponents. Unfortunately, they didnt catch on fast enough, and played enough defense to knock over one of the robots that was trying to feed balls to the middle, and the middle robot couldnt help get many balls over, but interestingly enough, it still sort of worked! Final score was 5:0, winners got 2 penalties, so we LOST and got 5 rank points, the other alliance WON and got 3 rank points... we vaulted back up in the rankings... Needless to say everyone watching was confused, they thought we were "stuck in the goal".

Next match, we played to win, opposing alliance had a lot of issues, and we won 9:0, would rather they have scored, but it was still good for our rank points (better than any of the 2:2 matches).

We looked at our second to last match and said, well we are the much stronger scoring alliance by A LOT, and the other team had two bots that were playing Defense nearly all qualifiers. We got together with 229 and convinced all the teams to implement the 6v0 concept, with us feeding the opposing alliance. At the start of the match, our robot scored 3 balls for them... our parents and spectators were dumbfounded. They thought our drivers were confused. We then scooted to the middle and proceeded to feed them balls the whole time. Result was 11v0, a reasonably successful 6v0 score, and a much higher score than if we had let them play defense on us.

Our last match (despite what Jeff said), we actually intended to win. We had a strategy that we thought could beat the 217/1551/3044 alliance... but then our two partners died right at the start of the match (control issues - one accidentally hit the power on the classmate ugh). Our drivers quickly realized this and scooted themselves into our goal and just sat there, not intentionally playing 6v0, but realizing that we were up against a really tough alliance and there was no point in just boosting their rankings. They didnt walk away from the controls in protest, there was just nothing else they could do. And I will tell you it made for an even more dull match with 3 robots just sitting there. We made it to 3rd seed following that. It does seem very weird that a team that "gave up" because two alliance partners were dead gets rewarded for basically just not hindering our opponents.

We finished in 5th seed, not bad for a 5-5-0 record. I will be honest, it felt really weird, but we were playing to the rules.

Honestly, if all of the teams took on the same attitude and played to how FIRST was hoping this played out (which I think the intent was just to eliminate defense), then we would have much more epic offensive battles on the field. But with the near/mid/far zone starts, I think so many teams see the "far zone" as their defensive soccer player, there to mess up the other teams from scoring. While true in eliminations, it just hurts the entire field for qualifiers. I think if FIRST just made some "no defensive contact" rule it would have had a much better effect. Instead you end up with strategies where sometimes its better to "throw the match" if you think you are going to be defended.

However, I think if you look at FLR, the good teams that played to win the matches ended up at the top for the most part. 1551 definitely played every single match to win, and I think 217 and 145 did as well. It really just mattered if their opponents decided to play defense or not. I will be honest, we played to seed high, and I think there will be a lot more of that coming up. But if teams start to recognize how all of this works and stop playing defense (maybe until the last 30 seconds), we will see a lot more high scoring matches and a lot more high rank scores & coopertition points. But until teams lay off the defense, 6v0 and the "sit in your own goal" strategy are going to be played by teams aiming to select their own alliances. Its confusing as all heck for spectators, and its really hard to switch gears to strategize for finals, but its the rules we have. You figure it out.