Why I love the coopertition bridge

[Jaxom]

Originally Posted by Grim Tuesday

...looking at recent years, the latest implementation of Coopertition was in 2010, with the screwy ranking system. It would seem that the goals of the system were to help other teams off and on the field, to make the score as high as possible, and thus more fun to watch for spectators. However, it didn't really work out that way. People helped off of the field, but that's always been part of FIRST tradition. On the field, the coopertition, I feel, never developed in the way the GDC intended it to. No team fed balls to the other alliance for the goal of making a closer game, because that would simply be stupid.

I don't know about *feeding* balls to other teams but many teams certainly scored for the other alliance in 2010. We had a number of matches where we ended up scoring most of the other alliance's points, in an attempt to give us more seeding points. And we were far from the only team that did that.

Originally Posted by Grim Tuesday

However, this year, the GDC nailed it.

While I agree that this year's implementation was better than 2010, in my opinion it still leaves something to be desired. There's *too* much emphasis on the coopertition bridge; I feel it would be a better system if the points were a bit smaller than winning; say 3 for a win & 2 for a co-op balance.

Haven't teams always been rewarded for knowing how to play the game? The difference is, I think, that "knowing how to play the game" has usually meant "knowing what's important to put into the best robots". This year I think that's still the case, but this year you have to rely on *all* the other teams knowing how to play the game -- not just your alliance. You really *do* need to cooperate with the other team.