Playing Dirty

[Nate Smith]

Originally posted by Adams High Man
The entire placebo robot used was built last year. It therefore had several competitions to tweak its drive system. Also, a teacher/sponsor fixed up the robot for use, which is another violated core OCCRA rule.

As Mr. Mac has already mentioned, this is only because the actual placebo robot was not ready in time for the first event, and rather than not have the placebo at all, going against what teams had been told would be at the event, they used a pre-built(in this case, a OCCRA bot from a previous year) in which all systems except the drive had been disabled. This disabling of robot functions was the only "fixing up" by a teacher/sponsor which took place.

Originally posted by Adams High Man
Also, the semi-random match selection was invalidated. 3 out of 5 competitions, we were on the field with the placebo. The game leaned away from being about competing with other schools, and more towards competing with the placebo. Other teams, who only were against the placebo once or never, had a more diverse competition. OTC was not matched against Rochester 3 times, for example.

One thing to keep in mind here...the placebo was not paired with/against teams using the standard semi-random pairing method used for the other competing teams. Rather, as was mentioned to teams when the placebo was announced, the placebo was put into place whenever a team notified the event staff that their robot was not able to participate in a match. Therefore, the placebo team does not know when they will be competing until just a couple minutes before they play. Because of this portion of the placebo's purpose in the OCCRA competition, it is entirely possible, as well as entirely beyond the control of OCCRA, that some teams may face the placebo more than other teams.

Since the pairings method was brought up, I will expand slightly on how the pairings are done. Note that an incomplete version of this pairings logic was used at the Rochester tournament, so not all of these criteria were in place. The scoring software randomly assigns teams to matches, using the following criteria:
-Every team must play once before a team plays a second match.
-No team will have the same alliance partner more than once.

In addition, a few formulas are in place to make sure the matches are somewhat evenly weighted(i.e. not the top 2 teams vs the bottom 2). In these cases, it is the season rankings as of the beginning of the tournament that determine this formula.