What did we learn from week 2 of the 2013 season?

[AllenGregoryIV]

This game is messing with a lot of things. This might be the first time in along time that I feel that FRC might have balanced a game in a good way(not 2009). The good teams are still good but they aren't leaps and bounds ahead of the lower seeds. Nothing is decided till the matches are played. I'm not sure if this will stay true but it seems like we'll have some good upsets at championships as well.

Scouting is amazingly important. A lot of very good teams get left out of eliminations because the alliance captains didn't have good enough data. At lone star alone I know of at least 4-5 teams that weren't playing on Saturday afternoon that should have been. This happens every year but it seems worse this year. If you're very smart you can put together a really good bottom end alliance. #7 from Lone Star (231, 192, 1429), I still can't believe those three got together after 231 declined 57, all of them were first round picks.

The elimination matches at Lone Star played more similarly to the qualification matches than I thought. I think this is because we saw more qualification defense than in years past at LSR.

There are many different ways to win in this game and I still don't know if we know which way will find success in St. Louis. At some regionals the pyramid discs were in play often (Orlando) and in others only one was scored the whole event (by a 148 human player at LSR).

Also 2056 and 1114 are really good.