Rookie Teams in Elims

[Ariful]

Originally Posted by Dr Theta

Scouting can not be understated at competition. The rankings are almost never the best metric to go off of when it comes down to alliance selection, especially in years that the GDC feels like experimenting with the seeding algorithm.

I will use our experience this year as an example. We ended up seeding 29th at our regional not due in particular to poor play or poor strategy, but due to the fact that in 9 matches we only got 1 coop balance due to a little bad luck. We also needed to zone in our shooter to our hotspots throughout the course of the regional and did not get it to peak functionality until our second match on Saturday for both hybrid and teleop. We weren't bad before then but we weren't where we wanted to be.

Despite being a very solid team I think that our low ranking caused us to be largely overlooked throughout alliance selection dropping all the way to the second pick for the fourth seed who had done their scouting on us throughout the weekend and communicated with us, we were upfront with them as far as what problems we had and what we had done to fix them. Ultimately their scouting and selection of us allowed our alliance to upset the number one seed at our event, set and break the high score of the regional three times, and post a perfect 36 point autonomous.

By the end of the event I would estimate that we were possibly a top 5 shooting bot, top 3 bridge bot, and the best bot at our regional at traversing the field, and yet we were the 21st robot into elims at our event.

I agree that it is possible for teams to overlook others, be it rookie or veterans due to different factors such as high team number or ranking, but those that know what they are doing and scout properly do not let those factors get in their way.

I really believe our robot should have been in one of the few alliances...It was all a scouting problem.. But really, I need other teams to comment on this.. Will contact them soon enough :/