2014 OPR After Week One Events

[Bongle]

Originally Posted by efoote868

Would anyone like to speculate on how OPR fits true robot scoring abilities or alliance contributions this year compared to previous years?

One thing I see that is different this year is that any particular alliance can do much better (or much worse) than the sum of the individual teams since robots can't do their own thing for an entire match.

It should be pretty excellent at giving a rating for a team's contributions this year, and in fact should be fantastic at finding teams who contribute to their alliance without doing the prestige tasks. A team that adds two assists on every ball but doesn't shoot it through the goal will get a good OPR.

However: even moreso than in past years, you won't want to scout with it. A team might get a 60-70pt OPR without ever firing a ball. If you also don't shoot a ball, you probably want to find a shooter or a low-goal specializer. If you already have a fantastic shooter, you may not want to pick a team that earned their OPR with a shooter. In past years you could maybe get away with picking the top 3 in OPR for an alliance, but with such different functionalities and roles, you'll want to make sure that everyone is compatible.

Also, keep in mind that you can't always compare across events with OPR - an event where everyone tends to play offense and keep to themselves will elevate all their robots OPRs, compared to an event with heavier defense.

Another thought about the penalties: It would be interesting to not only remove the penalties from scores (as has been done), but to actually subtract them from the team that caused them when putting inputs into an OPR-solver. This would help find teams that are racking up a lot of penalties, since their OPRs would go much lower.

tl,dr: OPR will be great for entertainment purposes to do comparisons across robots who do different tasks, but poor for scouting.