FRC Blogged - What Do You Think? The ‘Invite to Decline’ Strategy

[Kims Robot]

Originally Posted by Nemo

Two things:

1) I like the serpentine draft, but 1-8,1-8 is going to reduce the number of declines if that's the desired outcome.

2) More qualification matches is going to reduce the likelihood that the top seeded team is somebody that other teams would decline.

I'm not sure I understand your #1 - The toughest part to deal with in the "Scorched Earth" strategy is in the initial 1-8 selection. I think if they allowed you to decline and be picked, and teams did that in the second round of selections (1-8 or 8-1 doesn't matter) a lot of teams would hurt themselves by wanting to be picked by a different team, and declining an alliance, and then possibly not being picked by the captain they wanted to be picked by. So the only time a decline and be picked really helps anyone is if you are in the top 8 and already guaranteed a spot, get picked by say #2, but want to work with #4.

I personally have zero problems with the alliance selection today. Even the "scorched earth" strategy. I think in 99% of the cases, scorched earth is unfortunately caused/used by teams who managed to make it into the top 8 and its perceived that maybe they shouldnt have (had a lucky schedule, caught some lucky ref calls, etc...). Its not usually a powerhouse team who just wants to break up other power house alliances.

Plus I feel like if they allowed declines, say a cardboard box on wheels managed to make it into seed 3. Say that almost no one in the 45 teams at an event wants to work with this team because they know it means sure loosing. The box on wheels makes a pick list (mostly based on rank) and starts picking... it takes them 30 teams before someone says yes... do YOU want to sit through those alliance selections?? Ugh they take long enough as it is!! I don't want it to suck up the entire lunch and then some! But if they made some weird rule like a team could only be declined 5 times... then that 6th team gets "stuck" just like anyone above or below them would.

I think one of the things I've always liked about the current alliance selections - both the "zero declines" and the "1-8, 8-1" is it does help even out the alliances in most of the regionals. I understand the argument of the #1 seed "earning the right to select first", but I think they get that by having the first pick. The biggest problem is that there is such a wide variety of FIRST teams currently. I think as we proceed to more and more district championships, Super regionals, and IRI type events where 90% of the teams are amazing... I think then it may be time to relook at the alliance selection. If you give me events with 30+ awesome robots, then Im ok with 1-8, 1-8. But if we allowed teams to build powerhouse alliances no matter what rank they were, I think it would be unfair to the teams that seeded high, and we'd just be setting ourselves up for some incredibly boring finals where we see a lot of 80-5 scores and certain alliances just get completely trounced. I personally like when the eliminations are exciting and its anyone's game. I think changing the declines or the serpentine in standard events would make it boring and make it easy to build powerhouse alliances.

I'm glad that FIRST/Frank are kicking around ideas on how to change/improve the program, but this is one I think they should leave just as it is for now.