2013 Lessons Learned: The Negative

[David8696]

Something simply MUST be done about the alliance selection and ranking systems in the Championship qualifying rounds. This year, my team (2485) wound up ranking 69th overall in Galileo, regardless of the fact that we ranked SIXTH in total teleop points, had the highest score of the qualifiers, and won our average game 133-106. We played with four of the bottom ten ranked teams in the tournament; in our average match, the ranking of our partners was 55.31 and that of our opponents was 46.33. Every single game that we played with alliance partners who, collectively, finished above .500 we won, and handily–our average win was by 94 points. Every game we played with alliance partners who were below .500, we lost, but not by much–our average LOSS was by 25 points, with two games decided by a disk and one decided by a climb. And in the game we lost by 8 points, one of our partners slipped off the pyramid a second after the buzzer rang.

I probably sound like a whiny little kid throughout all of this, but let me just say that we enjoyed every second of our first trip to nationals, and hope to return for many years to come. We just couldn't help but feel almost cheated by pure bad luck as we watched a robot that we felt was heavily underranked go without being picked for elimination.