WEEK 1

[Joe Schornak]

Something that surprised me at San Diego was how different alliance selection ended up being in comparison to previous years, mostly because the coopertition bonus allows teams that cannot shoot baskets consistently to seed very high. In every previous regional that I have attended, the uberbots who could hang all the rings or score all the balls invariably seeded in the top eight, and alliance selection consisted of the 1st seed picking the 2nd seed, the 3rd seed becoming the 2nd seed and picking the new 3rd seed, and so on. At San Diego, no alliance's 2nd pick was from the top eight, since most of the really strong scorers had been too specialized towards shooting to do coopertition in many matches. This meant that the elimination alliances were more balanced than in previous years, and I did not get the impression that any one alliance was significantly stronger than the others.

Based on these observations and from looking at the team ranking charts, I have concluded that it may be more important to get coopertition points than to win a match if one wishes to be highly seeded, which strikes me as somewhat counterintuitive to my competitive sensibilities but probably reasonable. Has anyone calculated any sort of "sweet spot" for number of matches won without coopertition vs. matches lost with coopertition? Would it even be possible to calculate this?

On the whole, I really like Rebound Rumble. The qualification matches can be rather boring if everyone just stays on their own side, but the endgame is very tense and exciting, especially in the eliminations when an alliance goes for a three-bot balance and only makes it in the last few seconds. Near-realtime scoring is a very good thing, since I don't have to wait until the end of a match to see who actually won after penalties are calculated. I look forward to seeing how everyone adapts and adjusts in reaction to what we have learned this weekend.