Tips for Team Promotion to Scouts

[jspatz1]

I can offer you our perspective for what it is worth.

To be truthful, there is very little your team members can say or do off of the field to "market" your team/robot for alliance picking. We look for alliance picks exclusively through performance and attributes displayed during qual matches. Veteran teams learn that the claims about robot capabilities made by team members anxious to be considered may or may not be true. The only information that scouters can really trust is what is displayed on the field. This can be technical capabilities of the robot, skill and smart choices by the drivers, or a cooperative drive team helps make a match plan and sticks to it.

The best marketing tool is to execute what you can do on the field. If you have an attribute that you think a highly ranked team should want, concentrate on displaying that attribute rather than just winning matches. We do not look at win/loss record or rankings when considering alliance picks. We look for capabilities and smart play that will help our alliance win. If you get the opportunity to play a qual match with a team you hope to join in elims, concentrate on fulfilling your role, and show them you can be a smart, cooperative partner.

The members in our pit are not the ones making scouting and pick decisions, so it does little good to make your pitch to them. If you have a capability that you want us to know about, ask one of our members to get word to our scouters to watch for you and your capability before you play, then go out there and execute it. We can't hope to notice every skill of every team/robot, so we are happy to have you tell us when/where to look. If you have a capability that can help our alliance win, we absolutely want to know about it. But let us know before you play, so we can see it with our own eyes.

[Jon Stratis]

We have a pretty small team, which makes promoting ourselves to other teams difficult - once you consider the people wee need in the stands scouting, those who are driving, and those we need to keep in the pit to fix the robot and talk to judges, we pretty much don't have anyone left to wander the pits talking to other teams.

So instead, we get ourselves noticed by our actions. We go out and do our best on the field, and focus on working with our alliance partners in every match. We engage everyone else who is going around scouting and stops by our pits. And as others have mentioned here, we've crafted a very distinctive look for our team that stays in people's minds.

We've also noticed that many teams either don't scout or don't know how to do so effectively. Our rookie year, we were in a position to be picking... and our scouting consisted of taking pictures of robots so we could look through them and talk about which robot we thought was best. Fortunately, we had a great team come up to us Friday morning. They said "You're going to be picking this afternoon, and we think we'll be a good alliance partner for you for these reasons... If you're willing to pick us, we'll share this crate of scouting information we've gathered over the past two days." From that, we learned what scouting was and how to actually do it.

So, starting with our second year we've done serious performance-based scouting. Not only that, but we've shared that data with everyone who wants it (and probably with some people who didn't). We print out a summary of our data, showing lists of the top teams in different categories (this year, it would include number of balls scored, number of bridges balanced, stuff like that). We include a cover letter that describes what the data represents and how it was gathered. That then gets delivered to the pits for the younger teams (mostly rookies), and in the past we've had second or third year teams come up and ask for it, remembering it from last year. The goal here is two-fold: We ensure that all the teams picking have good scouting data, which thus far has always helped us, and we ensure that they learn something about how to collect good scouting data so they can do it next year. Plus it ensures that all those teams know who we are

Also, the team discusses scouting Friday night, and pretty much figures out who is going to be on our picking list (if we're in a position to pick), and who we want to watch closely Saturday morning for more information. Teams running around Saturday trying to get noticed don't affect our scouting at all - those in the pits generally have no say on alliance selections. It's the drivers (for feedback on how they work with different teams), and those in the stands who have actually watched every match that make the decisions, and the decisions are based almost entirely on the hard data.

[remulasce]

@SuperNerd256, unfortunately due to a combination of being a programmer and having been kicked out- er, graduated, I am not in a position to provide photos. It's a drop-center 6 wheel drive, center wheel directly driven from custom ratio supershifters, with one chain powering the two edge wheels on dead axles sandwiched between 1/2"(?) CNC-cheesed aluminum sideplates. Idlers are positioned to give proper chain wrap on the center wheel. Key to this is donated CNC time from Northrop Grumman, it would be very hard to pull off without the precision of those machines.

On second thought, I remembered that I stole- was gifted- one of 2010's practice base sideplates. This is still useless to you, as I did not bring it to my dorm, where I am.

[DavidGitz]

Originally Posted by jspatz1

I can offer you our perspective for what it is worth.

Very good advice. We also base our picks solely on performance and not on marketing, except during certain circumstances. This year, more than most the ranking system is very bad at determining how well a robot/team actually performs on the field. The only time I ever looked at the rankings was when we were hoping to seed above Titanium and when we were remarking at how bad the ranking system worked.

[bam-bam]

Originally Posted by DavidGitz

Very good advice. We also base our picks solely on performance and not on marketing, except during certain circumstances. This year, more than most the ranking system is very bad at determining how well a robot/team actually performs on the field. The only time I ever looked at the rankings was when we were hoping to seed above Titanium and when we were remarking at how bad the ranking system worked.

If you're talking about ranking, yes, it's pretty misleading.

However, the ranking system has the stats for tele-op points, hybrid points, bridge points, and cooperition points. I wouldn't call that part misleading.

[EricH]

Originally Posted by bam-bam

If you're talking about ranking, yes, it's pretty misleading.

However, the ranking system has the stats for tele-op points, hybrid points, bridge points, and cooperition points. I wouldn't call that part misleading.

Until you figure out that all those points are scored by the alliance.

If I'm a Boxbot and I'm paired with two robots of the caliber of 1114 and 254 every single match, I'm going to look a lot better in the standings than my Boxbot really is.