Is alliance selection usually this bad?

[Akash Rastogi]

Originally Posted by lineskier

After watching SVR and watching the alliance selection, I can't believe how bad some of the alliance selection has been. The fact that 691 wasn't picked at all is mind boggling to me. Maybe its just me, but alliance selection seems horribly unorganized and is costing some teams banners.

On another note I am excited to see if the 2nd alliance can beat the poofs. I think they have a significant chance of pulling it off!

While texting mentors of 1323, their reasoning is that 604 has a functional minibot, whereas 691 does not.

I was surprised 691 wasn't picked as well.

[mwtidd]

Originally Posted by Akash Rastogi

While texting mentors of 1323, their reasoning is that 604 has a functional minibot, whereas 691 does not.

I was surprised 691 wasn't picked as well.

This is when you enter the grey area, what's worth more: a semi functional minibot or a good robot. There is no answer, and at the end of the day you have to roll the dice. Unfortunately for them the selection didn't pan out.

If you can't get a proven minibot, I would go for a proven robot. 691 is gorgeous and powerful. A well deserving 3rd pick. but then again it comes down to autonomous and minibots(which 691 lacked both)

[alectronic]

I heard from a ref at a different event that I called when I saw this that they would probably have classified this as a decline, and thus they would not be eligible to play at all. So, as pointed out, they probably chose to play over get nothing.

[mwtidd]

Originally Posted by techalex

I heard from a ref at a different event that I called when I saw this that they would probably have classified this as a decline, and thus they would not be eligible to play at all. So, as pointed out, they probably chose to play over get nothing.

Yeah this is what I suspected watching the webcast...

I think the philosophy behind the rule, is to not allow stacked teams. It's already a huge problem this year. Allow teams to rig selection and it becomes a bigger problem.

[EricH]

Originally Posted by lineskier

I think the philosophy behind the rule, is to not allow stacked teams. It's already a huge problem this year. Allow teams to rig selection and it becomes a bigger problem.

From what I've heard, it's the selection-rigging that was the bigger issue back when there were unlimited declines.

For the record, the toughest selection for a single team probably happened back in 1999/2000, somewhere around there. Mind you, this is back before we all got this whole selection thing fully figured out. This is at the Nationals (and yes, I do mean Nationals, not Championship) at Epcot. One team somewhere in the middle of the order called on 5 or 6 or more different potential partners before getting an acceptance, or something like that (memory is kind of funny when stuff is that long ago). Picked already, declined, declined due to needing to catch a plane, picked already, declined, that sort of thing, until someone finally accepted. Not a place I'd want to be...

[Grim Tuesday]

Interesting, there are no actual scouting guides out there, just programs/sites to use. Noone actually teaches rookies how to scout...

[TJ92]

I don't think there is anything wrong with alliance selection this year, FIRST just doesn't rank teams well. I don't even look at the data FIRST provides. When I'm up there making picks I go solely off what my scouters give me.

[h1n1is4pigs]

i was out there as a team captain at SVR and watching it i was surprised at how ill prepared some of the alliances were. i have a small team, less than 15 people and we still have a relativly decent scouting program and would easily have been more organized than some of the alliance captains out there.

[mwtidd]

Originally Posted by TJ92

I don't think there is anything wrong with alliance selection this year, FIRST just doesn't rank teams well. I don't even look at the data FIRST provides. When I'm up there making picks I go solely off what my scouters give me.

If you can find a recording from SVR, you'll see what we're talking about. Teams picking weak teams for their first pick, trying to opt out of captainship, and the list goes on...

Lower ranked captains were in a good position to create strong alliances, but failed to do so. Good teams are rarely left for the 1st and 2nd alliances, however at SVR, good teams, were widely available.

One reason, people focused on minibots. Well at SVR it was autonomous that won the finals not minibots.

[TJ92]

Originally Posted by lineskier

If you can find a recording from SVR, you'll see what we're talking about. Teams picking weak teams for their first pick, trying to opt out of captainship, and the list goes on...

Lower ranked captains were in a good position to create strong alliances, but failed to do so. Good teams are rarely left for the 1st and 2nd alliances, however at SVR, good teams, were widely available.

One reason, people focused on minibots. Well at SVR it was autonomous that won the finals not minibots.

I so wish I could have been there, MTR would have crushed alliance selections; the competitions we have been at have been pretty good for selections. When I said nothing is wrong I probably exaggerated a bit, because I have noticed a few lower teams getting picked at regionals/districts , but they were raked low on our data. As far as how high those teams ranked according to FIRST I have no idea what it was.

Also does anyone have video from SVR? I would like to take a look at it.

[mwtidd]

Originally Posted by TJ92

I so wish I could have been there, MTR would have crushed alliance selections; the competitions we have been at have been pretty good for selections. When I said nothing is wrong I probably exaggerated a bit, because I have noticed a few lower teams getting picked at regionals/districts , but they were raked low on our data. As far as how high those teams ranked according to FIRST I have no idea what it was.

Also does anyone have video from SVR? I would like to take a look at it.

A big problem with FIRST's ranking is it favors consistent minibots. If you get first place in most Q matches you will win most Q matches. However come the finals, its a very different story, and sometimes very hard to predict. At SVR the field was starved for tubes, so ubertubes accounted for huge portion of the tube score. 254's alliance did not have the fastest minibots, but put up 2 or 3 ubertubes vs 1868 who had the best minibot, but their alliance only put up 1 ubertube. The match was over before the drivers touched the controls.

The game that ends up being played on Einstein is going to be crazy interesting.

[Techhexium]

I cannot comment for FRC but I think alliance selection can get disappointing in FTC. Despite different competitions I do see some trends in both competitions in this subject of matter.

In the NorCal FTC tournament, a few outstanding teams did not get chosen for alliance selection and a few bad teams were chosen instead. Part of this is due to the randomness of competition. Even for teams considered the best, things don't always go as expected.

I think the tube starvation situation is one that contributes to the randomness, so it requires high levels of strategy.

[SamMullen]

While I'll agree that minibots were overemphasized during the alliance selection, I would not say that it was ubertubes that won the finals for 254's alliance. If I remember correctly, during that last match 1323's alliance was 1 tube away from completing a logo on top, and one team had dropped or failed to place that very tube several times. I would argue that being able to place tubes reliably in general, uber tube or normal, was what decided that match.

[Cory]

Originally Posted by lineskier

254's alliance did not have the fastest minibots, but put up 2 or 3 ubertubes vs 1868 who had the best minibot, but their alliance only put up 1 ubertube. The match was over before the drivers touched the controls.

The game that ends up being played on Einstein is going to be crazy interesting.

254, 1868, and 1538 all used the same minibots.

[Garret]

I appreciate the all the nice things said about my team's performance at SVR. I am glad we weren't the only team who thought we were good. We were surprised we didn't get chosen, sort of.

We knew our minibot wasn't the best, it was a pathetic 3.5 second climb, but we did successfully deploy it several times during qualifications, winning us at least one round. However the refs were very inconsistent with how they judged us so they sometimes counted our mini-bot but they disabled our tower twice, both times they were wrong and we were able to cite the rules and prove how it could physically not have been above the line, costing us one or two wins.

We could have also won another of our matches if we had completed our second logo (we had the triangle in possession) rather than going for minibot, which failed do to a hardware failure, basically our minibot got stuck on our hostbot.

We had actually been working on our autonomous using dead reckoning and line sensors. But were slowed down when we discovered that our encoders on our wheels were different counts per rotation, which explained our turning on the practice field while testing. We also had been rather hesitant after our first practice round at LA where a bug in the code caused us to start smoking during autonomous as we roasted a motor.

Our team was sort of depressed when we weren't chosen, as this is our last regional and this was a large portion of our team, including myself, are graduating. But we can always do better during the offseason competitions and next year when we will be using our swerve drive (which is made just we didn't have time to implement into the robot), that way we won't be able to be defended anymore. But overall we are proud of our robot, we had good driving, a decent minibot, and a good scoring robot. We learned a lot this year, and we will improve our performance next year. In the end we did our best, learned a lot, and had fun. With that said winning really doesn't matter too much to us.

We were surprised by the lack of scouting/preparation of the alliance captains at SVR. Even though we knew after friday that we would not be an alliance captain, we still had a team of 6 students in the stands scouting for us, when we brought only 12-15 to the tournament. My team believes that the lack of adequate scouting and preparation of alliance captains is why so many good teams were not chosen for eliminations. I noticed that a some of the lower seeded alliances picked the next person down on the list rather than a team that would have been better for their alliance.

Again thanks for the compliments about our robot's performance.