2014 Game

[EricH]

Originally Posted by wilhitern1

I keep coming back to someone's post... What if there were 3 alliances on the field at once. It just seems so intriguing! Perhaps a trigional field design.

I know there's a lot of money invested in the current field design. So it will never happen. SAD!

Originally Posted by Whippet

Every time someone says that something will never happen, the GDC adds it as a possible game.

Awright, you young whippersnappers. It's time for your history lesson. So sit on down (but NOT on the lawn!) and clean out your ears...

The money invested in the current field design is not the reason 3 alliances will never happen. The REAL reason is that it ALREADY happened--and FIRST did not like what was happening.

Let's go back to 1998. I was hanging around a team, but not on it yet (my dad was, though, and most of this comes through his stories). The game that year was played 1v1v1--that is, 3 alliances of one team each, red, white, blue--but they changed that to 1v1 for the very finals. Look up Andy Grady's post on the Bracket of DOOM! for the gory details.

Anyways, FIRST was looking through data of match results after the season that year, and noticed something weird. No very highly ranked team--I forget how high--won their first match of the day. It became obvious fairly quickly on looking at the matches in question that the other two teams in each match were playing defense on the top team. Now, FIRST couldn't prove any collusion. But, they did sense a problem--and one they'd continue to have under the "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" principle.

Their solution was introduced the following year at Kickoff. "Since collusion cannot be prevented, it will now be required." -- Woodie Flowers, Kickoff 1999. 2-team alliances were introduced. Initially, you were only told to be there for a match, where you'd find out who your partner was of the other 3 teams. Within a couple years, that announcement came when the match schedules did; various tweaks to the elimination setup also came around that time.

Long story short, FIRST will not go back to XvXvX because it will quickly become 2XvX.