An improvement to OPR

[Citrus Dad]

Originally Posted by SoftwareBug2.0

Obviously having your scouts get better data is the best solution, but there really is value in having the numbers as unreliable as they may be. Even if OPR for each phase of the game is +/- 50% from what that teams scores, that's often close enough to figure out what your match strategy should be.

I agree that the OPR is better than nothing--it still had a 0.91 correlation with our offensive scouting data. However, it tends to miss the outlier teams that may be hard to pick out otherwise. Our OPR was 27 points less than our actual offensive average--more than 50% off. But if your team has sufficient resources to calculate the OPR on the fly then you probably have enough to do full scouting. On the other hand, you might be relying on the OPR calculated with one of the apps tracking the competition, in which case then that's the best you have.

Originally Posted by SoftwareBug2.0

Also, DPR may be less reliable than OPR, but I've been told too many times that it's totally meaningless. It isn't. It just doesn't mean what people think that it means. It's purely how many points your opponent scores. So last year, when we were a robot that scored just enough points at championship to make it so that we were better off playing offense than defense our DPR was awful, while this year our DPR was great because opposing alliances were forced to defend us, and therefore have one less robot scoring.

4814 is a great case in point in Curie. Their OPR was only two points higher than their actual offensive output and their CCWM was only 9 points less than their OPR. They look like a defensive dud. Yet deeper digging shows that their defense was probably worth at least 30 points a match, and perhaps twice that.