Quote:
Originally Posted by Chris is me
Does everyone but me disagree with the second premise? I disagree with pre-arranged matches, but I thought "6v0 or not?" was pretty interesting. I guess I don't see "why" it's automatically undesirable for the loser to score for the winner but the reverse is okay.
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I, too, liked the extra strategic dimension added by the considerations of 6v0 and self-scoring. From my perspective, I thought the additional options for strategy helped to encourage some "out of the box" thinking.
The "self-scoring" consideration did lead to more communication and planning during qualification matches, which I think is a good thing.
However, a number of times throughout the season, we also encountered teams that were ethically opposed to the entire concept of scoring for the opposition or of having any cooperation with the opposing alliance. Such discussions tended to be difficult, awkward, and probably not in the best interests of any of the competitors. What is a team to do when it is arguably in the best interests of the alliance to maximize their seeding points by scoring for the opposition, yet there is a team that is ethically opposed to doing so because they don't want to do something which might be humiliating to the opponents?
We also encountered a surprising number of teams that "just didn't get it" with regard to why it was usually in a team's best interests to not play defense during qualifying matches (especially during week 1 before the 5-point winners bonus) or why once our alliance had a big lead, it was better to score for the opposition to maximize our own seeding scores.
We also know that our team's willingness to score for the opposition to help maximize our own seeding score was harmful to our own "OPR" value. At the North Carolina Regional, we probably scored about 30% of our goals during qualification matches for the opposing alliance, which served to bring down our OPR. On Archimedes at Championships, however, where the opposing alliance typically included at least one high-scoring robot, we scored very, very few goals for the opposition, and had a much higher OPR and CCWM as a result.
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Ken Streeter - Team 1519 - Mechanical Mayhem (Milford Area Youth Homeschoolers Enriching Minds)
2015 NE District Winners with 195 & 2067, 125 & 1786, 230 & 4908, and 95 & 1307
2013 World Finalists & Archimedes Division Winners with 33 & 469
2013 & 2012 North Carolina Regional Winners with teams 435 & 4828 and 1311 & 2642
2011, 2010, 2006 Granite State Regional Winners with teams 175 & 176, 1073 & 1058, and 1276 & 133
Team 1519 Video Gallery - including Chairman's Video, and the infamous "Speed Racer!"