what to do if the other alliance reneges on coop

[fovea1959]

I looked at http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...t=coopertition, but didn't see any discussion of this, and I got asked this question by another team's drive coach/mentor at Gull Lake....

What is an appropriate post-match response when the other alliance reneges on their half of an agreement to do coopertition? This wasn't a "they tried and failed", but a plain old "no visible effort" (confirmed by scouts in the stands)?

My advice was to go over, smile, and ask politely "urm, what happened?", listen, smile, and walk away (at least you called them on it!), but I'm searching for a better way to handle it.

I understand that ignoring it is an alternative, but *darn*, I hate it when people don't even *try* to make their commitments....

[Chris is me]

What else can you do, really? Take them off your pick list and move on.

[Ozuru]

Originally Posted by Chris is me

What else can you do, really? Take them off your pick list and move on.

Call your local Don and have them bust a few kneecaps.

OT: You really can't do much. All we do is just tell our scouts (who then put a black mark by their name) and make sure that we use the information to benefit us in the future.

[Hgree56]

We had that happen to us at Indy week 1. In our second to last match we played against a team who in the final seconds had the last yellow totes above the step but didn't lower them. Because of this match our average score lowered.

[BrendanB]

There's not much you can do. We had co-op planned for just about all of our matches at Reading but it was only completed maybe half the time for various reasons. Sometimes our alliance failed to deliver the first set of totes and sometimes it was the other for varying reasons.

Robots break, litter gets in the way, bins move into orientations they can't get to or prevent them from getting there, they might be waiting for you to place yours if there was a communication breakdown, etc.

The best thing you can do is talk to them to find out if something went wrong or to apologize if you were the link in the chain that broke and move along. Try not to assume the worst of your partners or opponents and if you do truly feel they stood you up don't stress over it and hold a grudge. There's not much you can do after the fact and by the time alliance selections come around you should both be on the same page and work together like professionals.

[JamesCH95]

I really appreciate when teams talk about what happened with co-op post-match. It does no good to mark a team off your pick list if there is a reasonable explanation for what happened.

I felt bad after a match in Pine Tree where we failed to get the 4th Co-op tote up, I explained to the other alliance that we had an unmitigated disaster on our side of the field with stacks getting knocked over and totes getting dropped that we had no control over. We couldn't get to the yellow tote in time to score it.

We've also dealt with litter getting dumped all over the coop area from our alliance or the other alliance, making co-op an exercise in futility.

In general its a good idea to actually talk to a team about their robot and its performance rather than just going based upon on-field scouting, for a variety of reasons.

[Ben Martin]

Stuff happens. As long as you tried, we're not going to remove someone from a pick list for a botched co-op attempt unless it's a consistent tote-dropping problem.

We let teams know that we'll be able to deliver somewhere between 1-3 yellow totes, depending if the auto works (really averages out at two). If we're only able to deliver one, I won't be too broken up if it doesn't get done.

[1629GaCo]

Team 1629 had the coop responsibility most of the time for our alliances, so we ended up negotiating before the matches on how things would "go". We did a three tote autonomous, so the totes were already close, even if the other alliance didn't want to coop, we still stacked our totes on the platform, to "show" that we could. We are a landfill bot so we had to go over there anyway. And if there was a team that said they could coop with us, and then didn't/couldn't after all, we would set the yellow totes close to the platform if by some chance they would make it at some point. That determination was made about 10-15 seconds after autonomous. We also had some teams outright tell us that they were not going to coop with us due to them being the #1 ranked robot and they had no one else on their alliance that could score like them and they didn't have time to do coop, which made no sense as it is a guaranteed 20-40 points depending upon the stack.

I guess how we handled it, was to do our thing no matter what another team did. Some teams want to help, some don't. We ended up the 9th overall seed of the tournament, then moved up to 6th during the draft selections, picked the 33rd and 16th ranked team, and won the whole thing, eventually beating out the #1 and #2 qualification match ranked teams.

To sum it up, "Do your thing, the rest will take care of itself"

[MrJohnston]

There are a thousand reasons, especially at a lower level competition, why the other alliance might fail to come through on a coopertition agreement.... We simply can't worry about it: Similar to a team mentioned above, we'll do our autonomous stack and immediately scoop up the totes to bring them to the step. We can have the three yellows on the step about 10 seconds into teleop. If the other alliance puts one on top: Great. Most teams will find that to be a very good use of their time (40 pts. in a match is more than 90% of teams could pull of individually anyhow). If not, we really haven't lost much as we'd have to be moving the stack out-of-the-way anyhow.

We are far more frustrated when alliance partners go back on pre-match strategy. Those teams are marked off our pick list.

[Nick.kremer]

Originally Posted by 1629GaCo

We also had some teams outright tell us that they were not going to coop with us due to them being the #1 ranked robot and they had no one else on their alliance that could score like them and they didn't have time to do coop, which made no sense as it is a guaranteed 20-40 points depending upon the stack.

While it may seem funky that the #1 team doesn't want to go for the co-op, you have to understand the position they are in. Ill give you an example:

3512 was ranked #2 (@ ventura) all day long during the first day of quals, ended #3, but in any case, we were in great position. We got there by putting up 2 stacks of 5 w/ R.C. and litter every single match. One of they key things for us was to be consistent, and adding co-op to the equation was too risky. The main reason for this was that teams simply could not get it done reliably every match. Now I know this doesn't sound like your team, but from my experience your team is an exception to this.

We played 12 qualification matches at ventura, our alliances planned for co-op for every single one of those 12 matches, and I'm pretty sure we only successfully got co-op twice. After the first 3 matches in a row of co-op falling through, and because of our ranking, I made the decision that my team would not be cooperating during any match, and instead that we should focus on building our stacks.

To conclude, I made the decision for my team not to go for co-op based off my opinion that teams were not consistent enough at following through, so why should i take time, and score less points, for something with only a 16.66% (2/12 * 100) chance of succeeding?

[evanperryg]

I said this in another thread, but I feel it's valuable here, too. My team has no ability to score co-op. We make this clear to all our alliance partners. However, we stack the co-op totes at the beginning of the match and then pass them to an alliance partner to hopefully score them. (assist?) It's pretty fast, out of the feeder. There's no loss, even if co-op isn't completed, because we still can put up 2-3 stacks in the time remaining.

[angelah]

Originally Posted by Nick.kremer

While it may seem funky that the #1 team doesn't want to go for the co-op, you have to understand the position they are in.

I agree. It's a balancing act. We try to get a balance between "capable of probably getting the coop done" and "can put up more of the points for our alliance" when deciding who to have do our half. It's often quite a feat trying to get the best team we can negotiate out of the other alliance, but I understand because we are doing the same thing.

[Tungrus]

Originally Posted by Nick.kremer

While it may seem funky that the #1 team doesn't want to go for the co-op, you have to understand the position they are in.

We saw this happening. I fully understand its their strategy, but I fail to understand why #1 team:
1. is not confident of their robot/drive team?
2. embrace the coopertition part of FIRST
3. deny their alliance of getting a higher score (especially if their alliance's robot is not as high scoring as them).

Well on the other hand I was not in their position, so its hard for me to understand. I hold no grudge against them.

[AdamHeard]

Originally Posted by Tungrus

We saw this happening. I fully understand its their strategy, but I fail to understand why #1 team:
1. is not confident of their robot/drive team?
2. embrace the coopertition part of FIRST
3. deny their alliance of getting a higher score (especially if their alliance's robot is not as high scoring as them).

Well on the other hand I was not in their position, so its hard for me to understand. I hold no grudge against them.

They are the #1 seed, presumably if they just keep doing what they're doing they will keep #1 seed. If that means skipping co-op, then they skip it.

The rules incentivize different things, and you should never judge a team for acting within their own self interest within these rules in a competition.

[Ichlieberoboter]

If they know that their alliance partners aren't very good and won't get them that many points anyway, they may want to suggest that they at least try since they wouldn't be making that much of a score difference anyway. They should of course, in that case warn you that the team may not be able to but they will try and there is a fairly good chance that the should be able to get one tote on the stack if you get 3. If they don't want this, then just go back to your original strategy.