**FIRST EMAIL**/Special Message from the GDC

[Kims Robot]

Originally Posted by Jim Meyer

It seems fairly clear to me they want us to place more value on the coopertition bridge than winning. If balancing on the cooperitition bridge means losing the match, why not do that? (we have) It's the same amount of points for your team.

Not sure who said it, but I like it: "Losing a match with a balanced coopertition bridge is like winning. Winning a match with a balanced coopertition bridge is like winning twice."

The hard thing is do you value a plastic trophy or registration for championships more? In our team's case, we don't have a ticket to championships, so we ultimately want to win the competition. I would guess many teams are in a similar boat. So we would prefer to "win twice" than get a trophy. In our case, we weren't against the coopertition bridge, we just wanted one of our alliance partners to do it instead.

And I don't mean to nitpick, but 67 lost a single qualifications match at your event, and it was 24:28, and I would have to guess the team thought it was possible to win when they went for the coop bridge (since it was 24:8 when they did so). But either way, it didn't impact your ranking since you seeded 1, 8 points above other teams (granted I get that it was only match 35, so you couldn't be sure). In our case, it was one of our later matches where we needed the 4 points to get us up into alliance selection area. The other team had no way of making it into the top 8, even if they won the match. So instead of seeding 5th, we seeded 9th (which is exactly where we would have ended up if we got the co-op bridge and didn't win). So ultimately it was just a loss for them, even for us.

Ultimately I think it depends... if you are on a dominant team that can do everything consistently, yeah, going for the co-op bridge every time is a good strategy. If you are a medium-high team, with no hybrid yet, where there is a risk you won't get the coop bridge, and you need the rank points... I don't think the line is so clear.