[Rizner]

I have a few things to add in here.

1) With penalties and the possibility to win a match, would it not be worth scoring as much as possible? You may seem to be down 10. In my opinion you still score in the case the other alliance gets 10 penalties -- I understand it is less frequent in the game now, but it is possible (I was in a week 2 regional and still saw a 6 point penalty alliance).

2) In a qualification match against (as the MC announced during the elimination matches) possibly the best scoring robot at the regional we played defense. If we would win we could get 5 points plus 2x what they score and then what we score and our alliance believed that would bring us above 8 points. They could have scored 8 easily if we weren't there, but we limited them to 3 -- unfortunately we still lost 3-0. Both alliances suffered from the match and at the time some teams may have thought it was a bad move on our part.
The alliance we defended against then chose us for eliminations because we showed them our defensive capabilities. Something to remember is you need to prove you're able to handle eliminations against some good teams in case your 6-0 matches (the ones you can get your alliance partners to agree with) may not be enough to get you in the top 8. If you haven't played and shown off what you can do against a defense or as a defense, what would alliance captains see in your team?

3) I would urge teams to really go over the situations and look to see how well they could do if they played 6vs0 in, lets say 3/4 of their matches (saying 1/4 the alliances had a team unwilling to cooperate). Look at how they would fair if winning 3-0 in matches vs losing 8-0. Sure you get the same amount of coopertition points but then your opponents get more -- something to take into account if your goal in qualifications is to end up top seeded.