Ethics of Telling a Team "No"

[Dival]

As a couch in the 1st seed at our regional, I must admit I've played terrible strategies in the qualifications. While we could get 70-100 doing cycles alone, most of the times I chose to play many assists in the match, often causing us to make much less score than we could do playing alone. Most of the times I knew that we can play the match better if we work alone and let the other teams play defense, but I couldn't let the other teams stay outside the game. It's important to remember that while most of the teams you play with have no chance to enter the top 10 in the seeding, most of them would want to show themselves, hoping to get some nice 2nd pick.

Of course, in some cases I found myself dealing not only with teams that try to show things they can not do in the match, but also with plain lies. In one match one of the teams claimed that their auto worked in every single game, even though my scouters said that they didn't try it even once. I could not stop convince them to give up the auto, and needless to say, it failed.

There will always be those teams that are hard to convince to play for the good of the alliance rather than for their own, but even they have to be accounted in the strategy. Even strategically, it's important to play with your alliance rather than against them. Hopefully, if you give up some part of your ideal strategy (like letting a team try their auto) you will more easily be able to play other parts of the game as you wish, or even "take" the game if it is needed.

Overall, I must agree with Michael. I hate the fact that teams should give up showing their abilities in order to win a match. While in last year, for instance, team needed to play as creatively as they could in order to win the elimination matches, this year teams have to play in a very conservative way, in order to avoid hurting the whole alliance.