Partner Scouting?

[flippy147852]

Is scouting in pairs (two people to one robot per match) much more effective than "traditional" scouting? Is two people overkill?

[theschell]

two people to one robot is not over kill. That just means your being carefull if one person misses the robot score.

[EricH]

I can scout two robots on one alliance in the same match. Now you're talking using two people to scout one robot?

It's overkill. One attentive person can easily scout one robot, and get everything, especially in this game.

Now, if you had one person per robot and one per tower, that would work quite well. The tower scouts time the minibots' vertical times and who deployed them.

[LoganAdams]

I think it might be overkill. If you are just counting tubes scored, and other quantative things that are objective, it should easily be done by 1 person, and they other people can switch matches so no one gets "burned out" after watching too many matches in 1 day. But if you have enough people, go for it.

[Chris is me]

If you have the manpower, it can't exactly hurt, but it would be better to rotate scouts every 10 matches in my opinion.

[BJC]

Perhaps instead have one person take some notes on the human players. Information about how the human players perform could be very valuable. Things like if they throw tubes on the field, how they load their robot, how far they can throw a tube, how well they coorespond with their team on the opposite side of the field, how long it takes them to pick out and load a tube into a waiting robot, if they give robots the wrong tube, etc.

Just a suggestion.

[magi65]

Originally Posted by Chris is me

If you have the manpower, it can't exactly hurt, but it would be better to rotate scouts every 10 matches in my opinion.

when i was scouting for breakaway last year it helped a lot switching on and off every 10 matches.

[NullEntity]

I would think that if you need two people per robot, you're scouting too much data. We used partners during Lunacy, but it turned out we were recording much more data than we needed. You need to find the perfect balance between data you need, data you can extrapolate from the data you already record, and possibly even giving some up.

[hensontam]

I think having two people assigned per robot per match is a bit overkill -- I don't think there's too much of a difference if a robot can hang +/- 1-2 game piece onto the pegs.

Also, if you're having two people scout each robot, I'm guessing it means that you either have way too many people in the stands and you need a "filler" role, or these scouters are going to have long shifts that can possibly have an effect of the effectiveness of your scouters.

[Grim Tuesday]

Sometimes, too many people can be bad: Our team is trying to keep scouting people to a minimum so that standards are held (ie, three out of five will always be the same for qualitative measures)

[nighterfighter]

I suppose you could do 2 people...

One for the quantitative measurements, (speed, time to deploy/minibot, auto, etc...) and another person could write down qualitative info.

That qualitative info could consist of any obvious/subtle weaknesses in their design. For example, if I push them from behind, they lose a lot of pushing force. Or if I ram into them full speed, they drop their tube.

While that qualitative information might be kind of pointless during qualifying matches, if you have a list of each robot's weaknesses during Finals, you could easily exploit those.

[Waffles]

Originally Posted by flippy147852

Is scouting in pairs (two people to one robot per match) much more effective than "traditional" scouting? Is two people overkill?

If you have enough people to spare so that two people can watch one robot, that is AWESOME.

In other news, our team keeps it one person to one robot, and then two other people to watch the feeders (because little did we know until we hosted our scrimmage, feeders make a big difference in the game O_o)

I think that one person per robot is fine, only because you'll see that robot on the field again later. Two people on one could be a distraction or too much of a focus.