Winning a Match vs. Winning Strategically

[Hoover]

Originally Posted by DampRobot

Hoover brings up a very important point. Would anyone ever be brave enough to publicly wise up to throwing a match to gain a strategic advantage? (Honestly, I thought saying that I considered it at all would bring the trolls out of the woodwork...)

I supposed it should have brought out trolls. Maybe they are busy in another thread.

If you really wanted to influence the score in this way, legitimately, the best way to do it is to rest your best driver. Our team wanted it to be that we left every participant drive if he/she wanted to. Considering all the work they did before, why not let them have some fun. When we did this sometimes our score suffered considerably.

For those who say how can you win doing that? What if having fun is more important than winning to us? What side of morals are we on?

To the question, did this hurt the other members of our alliance? The stark answer is yes it could. We did try to chose matches where we knew before hand we were obviously out matched, but that wasn't our highest priority.

And nothing's wrong with silver. Nothing's wrong with only moving a single match, if that's your definition of success. I think most people would agree that it's important to try your hardest to do your best, which may just be a blue banner. It's the difficulty of reconciling "trying your hardest" and "doing your best" in all their different forms that turns this into a real debate.

For us, what we liked is to be able to play. In our last venue we were not selected into quarter-finals. What hurt most is that we couldn't continue playing. You can drive a robot around a gymnasium all you want, but you can't replace the visceral experience of the matches.