Scouting, is it important?

[jamie_1930]

I was having this discussion with another teammate today, is scouting important? I'm interested to see what you guys think and I'm pretty sure for a lot of you the immediate thing is "He's crazy, how can you not love scouting!?", so let me explain myself first.

First off I'm the Drive Team Captain for my team, 2228, and I have been for since the beginning of last season. To this date I have yet to find any of our scouting information useful during competition. It's much more useful, I find, to have a few good eyes out there watching the games and then before each match I'll discuss it with them briefly and find out if there is anything they've seen that I haven't or if they think we need to watch out or don't have to worry about at all. Plus for the past several years for scouting we've made up our sheets, and constructed our database, then at competition we make up a schedule and have every team member rotate in sitting there and circling in bubbles like they're taking a test instead of enjoying themselves at the competition. I think it be much better if we just did away with scouting.

[Monty Python]

I suggest that you put on your flame shield as I suspect that I am going to be the first in a long line of people who disagree with you. But that's all right, it's your opinion and you're entitled to it.

That said, scouting has been tremendously important to me as a driver. Frequently before matches, our chief scouter will come to me and tell me how consistent they are, how they score, what defense needs to be played on them, their autonomous modes, and most importantly, where they score. In short, a lot of information that allows us to plan a more accurate and specific strategy that relies on information that takes more to gather than just having a few people watching matches. For instance, this team scores here and here around the 1:15 mark consistently, so try to play defense at this point in this way.

[Bjenks548]

I see your point to scouting not being important, however I have to disagree. As the lead strategist for 548 I have found that assigning a few robots to a student to know inside and out helps a lot. Going to your alliance partners and knowing what robot works best in which zone helped out a ton. Also guessing at your opponents strategy was helpful because it told you where your alliance might need two robots or where to play defense. I also agree that some of the scouting done is worthless. Again this year, I don't need to know what kind of ball possessor a robot uses, just how well it works. That's just my observations from two years on drive team and one year of strategy.

[BrendanB]

Originally Posted by Bjenks548

I see your point to scouting not being important, however I have to disagree. As the lead strategist for 548 I have found that assigning a few robots to a student to know inside and out helps a lot. Going to your alliance partners and knowing what robot works best in which zone helped out a ton. Also guessing at your opponents strategy was helpful because it told you where your alliance might need two robots or where to play defense. I also agree that some of the scouting done is worthless. Again this year, I don't need to know what kind of ball possessor a robot uses, just how well it works. That's just my observations from two years on drive team and one year of strategy.

Our team has never entered a match without strategy influenced from our scouting material. Our team has developed our scouting over the years and have an advanced system to chart what a robot does and how long they play zones. It has tremendously helped our alliance selections and have made several good picks in every tournament, the most notable would be team 1058 at GSR this past year. They made it through to be the third pick by the number 2 alliance as many alliances had overlooked them based on rank the day before, our scouting data showed them to be high in ball advances and scores. Our data has been extremely effective in determining match strategy and have won many matches every season that seemed to be un-winnable, but were due to determining a solid strategy based on facts.


Just my thoughts.

[Joe Ross]

Originally Posted by jamie_1930

It's much more useful, I find, to have a few good eyes out there watching the games and then before each match I'll discuss it with them briefly and find out if there is anything they've seen that I haven't or if they think we need to watch out or don't have to worry about at all.

What you've described is also scouting. We try to do both objective scouting (like the paper sheets you describe) as well as subjective scouting where a few smart people try to figure out the teams strategy and tendencies. We scout both for strategy for the next match, and for choosing who to pick. In both cases, we use the objective data as the starting point, and then modify our plans based on the subjective data.

Just like our robot, we improve the scouting throughout the season. We usually find that at the first regional we either collect too much objective data, or not the right types of objective data.

[Bethie42]

Ooh, scouting, my favorite subject! I was at a FIRST demonstration yesterday and was talking with a new member of our team, and a member of another team who said, 'You haven't told him about scouting? When I hear scouting, I think of Bethany!'
Anyways! I have been scouting captain for three years, probably the first person on our team to take scouting really seriously and invest a lot of time in it.

By the end of the first day of regionals this year, I had a personal knowledge of most teams on the field. And could spout off this memorized data to our team captain...she liked that

I always scout with the intention of being in a position to tell our team captain who to pick on Saturday morning. In reality, we have never been in a picking position. Scouting has, however, helped us immensely in playing from hour to hour. Before each match I will give our driver all the data I've collected on the teams we're playing with and against. Often we're the only team on our alliance with a familiarity of our competition. The same thing happens in finals, although unhappily I've sometimes known that our alliance partners [who picked us] were not as strong as they could have been, or had unwisely chosen our third partner. [Which they would not have done had they had as good a scouting system as ours...and on it goes.]

One type of scouting that I personally attach little value to is pit scouting. [I'd love to hear other peoples' opinions on this!] Because our small team is not always able to muster anyone else to help me scout, I consider it of much more value to watch every match, than to go round to a regional with 60+ teams and talk to each one. They give me data that I hardly ever refer to: I always trust what I've seen on the field, rather than what they say [or are sure] their robot can accomplish.

One big thing I see in favor of pit scouting is building rapport with other teams. I personally enjoy meeting other team members and promoting our own team And that sort of relationship can pay off big on Saturday. Then there's the Friday afternoon schmoozing....but that is much easier if you already have rapport with the team in question.

So to conclude this, I'd say that if you have a small team, focus entirely on match scouting: if you have one or two extra people, send them round to the pits. Oh and try to hang out with other teams after hours/during lunch. Although I am always busy every minute with compiling the data....can I get an 'Amen!' for a bigger scouting team?

[Chris is me]

Scouting is the most important thing a team can do at competition. At first you might think it's just useful for alliance captains but there are so many times before and during eliminations where good and up to date data will either save your butt or give you an edge. I think what really separates the great teams from the greatest teams is their scouting efforts.

If your team doesn't care about accurate scouting and you've never regretted a second round pick, you've been incredibly lucky. Luckily my team highly values scouting and my team's head scout is a very dedicated hard worker, so we've managed to grab teams that were absolute steals in the draft before.

I have seen some great teams get completely shortchanged by lackluster scouting. Do you really want to be the team with the #1 robot in the country making stupid selections because your data is terrible?

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edit: A note. While the responders above have many great points, and qualitative scouting is very valuable, it is always, always better to have quantitative data in addition to qualitative data. You're shortchanging your team if you have the manpower for both and only choose one.

[Peter Matteson]

Originally Posted by Joe Ross

What you've described is also scouting. We try to do both objective scouting (like the paper sheets you describe) as well as subjective scouting where a few smart people try to figure out the teams strategy and tendencies. We scout both for strategy for the next match, and for choosing who to pick. In both cases, we use the objective data as the starting point, and then modify our plans based on the subjective data.

Just like our robot, we improve the scouting throughout the season. We usually find that at the first regional we either collect too much objective data, or not the right types of objective data.

Joe got what I was getting ready to type spot on.

We learn what to look for by watching a week one regional and make our first rev of our scoutning plan. This is heavily influenced by our stratagy team deciding what we need to know to pick and what we need to know to win the match. If we learn after one event we didn't collect the right info we update our plan and move on.

All the info on each team gets filed into "the bible" after each match we watch. Our qualitative scouters work with the drive team to create stratagies that give us the best opportunity to win the match.

It's important not to just stick people as scouts, they need to want to do it and understand what it does for the team. Our group of 7-10 scouters always has a leader who wants to be there and keep things going because they know our method of scouting has done well for us over the years. If the scouts don't buy into the system and the plan then you get garbage output. Make sure that they feel they are contributing and not being wharehoused for the event.

[smurfgirl]

Originally Posted by Peter Matteson

All the info on each team gets filed into "the bible" after each match we watch. Our qualitative scouters work with the drive team to create strategies that give us the best opportunity to win the match.

...they know our method of scouting has done well for us over the years.

This is one of the biggest understatements I have ever heard. 177's scouting system is both fabulous and incredibly comprehensive. And if you look at their track record... well, their consecutive appearances on Einstein for the past five years and their two Championship wins are definitely heavily correlated to their excellence at scouting.

This is the part where I want to jump in with one of my favorite FIRST stories about how 1124 learned everything we know about scouting and countless other lessons from Team 177 back in 2006. We didn't really understand the purpose of scouting then, nor did we do much of it. We had some bad luck in our matches, and were ranked at 40/40 teams for a while on Saturday morning, but we moved up a few places to 34/40 after our final qualification match. We figured that with a number that low, there was no way anyone would ever pick us, and it was over for that competition. However, this was not so- after pairing up with Team 176, Team 177 invited us to join their alliance. And boy, had they done their scouting homework. In strategy discussions among the alliance, they shared information about other teams that blew our minds, because we were naive and understood virtually nothing about scouting. They knew exactly how to out-strategize each opposing alliance. To make a long story short, we played a lot of matches with the alliance because under their scouting-informed direction we kept winning them, and they opened up our eyes to the value of scouting, how to scout, and lots of other wonderful lessons that helped our team improve. (It was a bit more complicated for me; it was a magical experience for me because it was my first regional and a lot of things started to fall into place because of them... but the bottom line is still that scouting is important, and team 177 knows what they're talking about when it comes to scouting.)

[SammyKay]

Having been on drive team for the first two years of my time on team 316 and then being back up drive team this past year, I have to say that scouting is a HUGE part of succeeding in competitions. If you have a strong scouting team, then each match becomes slightly easier for you. Before each of our matches this year, we had one mentor who would come down and talk to our driver and tell her what our opponents had done in their last two or three matches. She would also tell our driver whether our alliance partners had broken down during a match or not so we could prepare ourselves for a loss of an alliance partner if it happened again. Even though many of us don't like to do match scouting, it is extremely useful for our team, especially if we modify our scouting techniques to fit the specific competition.

[rcmolloy]

Originally Posted by SammyKay

Having been on drive team for the first two years of my time on team 316 and then being back up drive team this past year, I have to say that scouting is a HUGE part of succeeding in competitions. If you have a strong scouting team, then each match becomes slightly easier for you. Before each of our matches this year, we had one mentor who would come down and talk to our driver and tell her what our opponents had done in their last two or three matches. She would also tell our driver whether our alliance partners had broken down during a match or not so we could prepare ourselves for a loss of an alliance partner if it happened again. Even though many of us don't like to do match scouting, it is extremely useful for our team, especially if we modify our scouting techniques to fit the specific competition.

Sammy is exactly right everyone. Not going to lie, the matches where we were hectic and running around trying to talk to teams to see what they knew really hurt us. Although, there were people from the stands giving us minor hints about the robot. (Saying if it was good or bad...not really helpful haha) BUT, in those matches, I had found it much easier to talk to other teams about strategy.

So I am guessing this topic has a lock for scouting being EXTREMELY important??

[Tetraman]

Will scouting always be some kind of "secret weapon" that teams must do on their own?

[EricH]

Originally Posted by Tetraman

Will scouting always be some kind of "secret weapon" that teams must do on their own?

Each team is looking for something different. As such, they will want different data about the same robot.

That said, if two or three or more teams were to collaborate on scouting, nobody would look askance at it. However, the data would need to be shared equally, and the work done roughly evenly, if possible. (Or, a pre-arranged agreement made, something along the lines of, we'll provide X students to help you gather data, in exchange for Y data set that you're already collecting.)

By the way, I do know that in the past, 330 has allowed teams access to what our scouting data showed about their performance. 1114 does somewhat of the same thing by releasing their scouting report before the Championships.

[JamesBrown]

Originally Posted by EricH

That said, if two or three or more teams were to collaborate on scouting, nobody would look askance at it. However, the data would need to be shared equally, and the work done roughly evenly, if possible. (Or, a pre-arranged agreement made, something along the lines of, we'll provide X students to help you gather data, in exchange for Y data set that you're already collecting.)

This is not necessarily the case. 358 has twice given 3280 their scouting data and access to their scouts because we didn't have enough people to effectively scout on our own. In both of these situations 358 was seeded below us. In one of the two 358 was seeded below us but was also with in the top 8, meaning we were picking the robots that they wanted before they had the opportunity.

From a match prep perspective I don't think I have seen a better system than 1519. Every match I go into I feel that I have a good idea of what the other bots will do. 1519 has concrete data that shows what they will do.

[Vikesrock]

Originally Posted by Tetraman

Will scouting always be some kind of "secret weapon" that teams must do on their own?

There are is a fantastic presentation on scouting/strategy written by Karthik that can be found on the 1114 website. I have a presentation that I gave at MN Splash that was based off of Karthik's and can be found at mnfirstregional.org

In 2009 Team 2175 collaborated on scouting at the Northstar regional with Team 171. In 2010 we again worked with 171, but a number of other teams joined in, by the end of the event the data was being shared with 10+ teams. There were definitely both pros and cons to doing things that way.