Week3 cumulative Twitter stats & OPRs

[Nathan Streeter]

Originally Posted by Jim Zondag

Excerpt from the above post:

win foul points awarded:
20 average (mean)
220 max

lose foul points awarded:
5 average (mean)
110 max

The above is a very simple assessment of how the foul points affect this game. 4X as many foul points to the winning alliance....this means that fouls swing a large percentage of matches.

50 point foul is effectively a automatic loss most of the time.
Tragic.
Worst game design since 2003, yet no real action to correct....
Tragic.

Agreed that the impact of foul points is tragic... and that foul points swinging the outcome of the match is likely a significant contributor to this statistic; however, I do think there is another possible/probable cause.

Fouls "take advantage" of less experienced, lower-performing teams. The teams that are more likely to get careless HP fouls, struggle to pickup a ball when inbounding, play hard defense that involves a manipulator flipping out and getting inside an offensive bot, or pin for too long are the teams that are less familiar with the rules, haven't kept up with the Q&A, and haven't designed as effective an offensive bot.

The fact that the teams most likely to suffer from the heavy fouls are also the teams that FIRST is having the hardest time retaining isn't a good thing for FIRST growing at or above average next year.

Consider me more and more on the side of "bring foul values down to 10 and 30." Keep in mind this is still 333% and 150% the value of fouls in 2013.

Big, Bad, Bobth Post! (#319)