looking at OPR across events

[Jared Russell]

Originally Posted by Karthik

Teams that consistently play on high scoring alliances will continue to get a higher OPR. Thus, teams who are very good at facilitating alliance partners, (Strong inbounding, passing, catching, etc) will eventually rise to the top.

The first statement is of course true, but the coupling of catching, assisting, and defense with other robots' actions means that very capable facilitators may not frequently and consistently play on high scoring alliances, regardless of the number of matches. (How many triple assist cycles have you seen remain uncompleted because the scorer kept missing and ran out of time?) It all depends on the distribution of robot capabilities at the event. A given team's event OPR/CCWM is conditioned based on this distribution, a result of OPR's assumed linear scoring model being fit to the game's non-linear and dependent scoring functions. (Hence, OPRs between events are not really comparable unless the distribution of robot capabilities is similar).

I assert that the distribution of robot capabilities in eliminations tends to be very different across all alliances. In total, more robot capabilities tend to be present, so partner- or opponent-dependent attributes will contribute more to an alliance than they did on average in qualifications.