301 points! and could have done more

[falconmaster]

Originally Posted by Duncan Macdonald

I've given up on my astute grandmother's coopertitional GP definition because it gets twisted to support any argument.

I expect every alliance I am on or against to employ a strategy that they feel will give them the best chance t victory. This would be the professional thing to do, and if any alliance diverges from this the experience of being a participant is cheapened.

If you don't draw the line there, and consider a "gentleman's agreement" professional then why isn't agreeing to collect 4 technicals each also professional, or donating 20 points in an unwinnable game gracious?

Someone made a fantastic post earlier in the year and made the argument "We don't allow steroids in sports because it cheapens the result." If we let steroids back in baseball, both sides can run faster, hit more home runs and have higher scoring games. But the result is less genuine. Not playing defence to artificially inflate scores and then boast about the high scoring Arizona finals is on the same level in my opinion.

If blue decided their best chance at winning was pure offence then more power to them. But the posts to date don't lead me to believe this was the case.

I expect every team to be kind, courteous and helpful off the field and to compete to the best of their ability on it.

I first want to say I love you guys. I do have to clarify something here. I hope I don't hurt anyones feeling in AZ but the situation was as such that after the first match, the losing alliance saw that they did not have a chance or a very slim one at winning so they took the challenge put forth by Steve Sanghi to hopefully do something incredible. By this point, the competition directly between us was over and we were trying to accomplish what no one took up earlier. We were in a sense working together in the spirit of co-opertition to achieve this new goal. It was exciting and I would bet you won't find one person who was there say they disagreed.

[TheOtherGuy]

Originally Posted by Duncan Macdonald

I expect every team to be kind, courteous and helpful off the field and to compete to the best of their ability on it.

The blue alliance did BETTER in the second match than in the first. How did they NOT play to the best of their ability?

[XaulZan11]

Originally Posted by s_forbes

I do not expect this to even be a notable (or even relevant) category among any teams with a good scouting team.

I hate to say it, but it kind of is notable. If given the choice between fairly equal robots, I'd choose to play with the team that fights to the last second to win opposed to deciding to play for a secondary game of $500 when things look bleak.

Maybe it is because I don't do fundraising or find sponsors for my team, but I would never agree to the bet. But, as long as all 6 teams agreed and weren't peer pressured into agreeing, then I guess it is ok.

[seg9585]

Originally Posted by Joshua Sicz

For me it was fun because the score was behind me and I was on my toes to see if we have beaten the challenge. It is also fun to drive I also played all the matches so far with defense so it was exciting to see a change.

Okay, but I watched the video and you didn't drive that match. You sat in the corner the entire game and did not move out of that spot. Your switch operator pushed a button 4 or 5 times to flick a ball a couple feet in the air. Surely you must have been doing more driving while playing defense. Your driver may as well have been a spectator.

As an employee of one of your team's major "Titanium Sponsors", it's a little upsetting to me that the funds didn't go towards a team interested in putting forth a best-effort towards winning the game because of handshake agreements

[s_forbes]

Originally Posted by XaulZan11

I hate to say it, but it kind of is notable. If given the choice between fairly equal robots, I'd choose to play with the team that fights to the last second to win opposed to deciding to play for a secondary game of $500.

Then I take it our actions at our local regional will lower our potential to be picked by you at championships? That is a very sad and unintended consequence.

[Gemmendorfer]

Originally Posted by seg9585

Okay, but I watched the video and you didn't drive that match. You sat in the corner the entire game and did not move out of that spot. Your switch operator pushed a button 4 or 5 times to flick a ball a couple feet in the air. Surely you must have been doing more driving while playing defense. Your driver may as well have been a spectator.

I think you are oversimplifying it here. If you want to use that logic, every operator just stands there and hits a couple of buttons to make the robot "flick" the ball out of the robot, whether it a couple feet or more than a couple feet. In the case of an inbounding robot for that alliance, why wouldn't it be okay to sit there and stay in position, since they were cycling pretty quickly anyways, and the few times the other alliance got the ball down the field to shoot, moving to defend would slow down the cycle time of their own alliance, and possibly not being a net benefit for the alliance anyways. Sometimes it is okay to not drive much in a match.

[TheOtherGuy]

Originally Posted by XaulZan11

I hate to say it, but it kind of is notable. If given the choice between fairly equal robots, I'd choose to play with the team that fights to the last second to win opposed to deciding to play for a secondary game of $500 when things look bleak.

See my last post:

Originally Posted by TheOtherGuy

The blue alliance did BETTER in the second match than in the first.

[Joshua Sicz]

Originally Posted by seg9585

Okay, but I watched the video and you didn't drive that match. You sat in the corner the entire game and did not move out of that spot. Your switch operator pushed a button 4 or 5 times to flick a ball a couple feet in the air. Surely you must have been doing more driving while playing defense. Your driver may as well have been a spectator.

As an employee of one of your team's major "Titanium Sponsors", it's a little upsetting to me that the funds didn't go towards a team interested in putting forth a best-effort towards winning the game because of handshake agreements

I agree with you about us driving but there is one thing different. I was driver and I also controlled the flicking of the robot. We only had one driver controlling the whole robot. Our other driver reads stats and condition control for the main driver. But I disagree with you about your money went into. We really do appreciate it. It did go to a good place. Like other people were saying, people were up and standing for the match. It was still intense for me. And for effort we but our best effort into. I can say that for all of the teams on both alliances. We gave it our best effort to score the most points. It is also our best interest in winning the game. It is everyone interest. I can also say we couldn't have done it without you. This year wasn't easy for us, we used all of the help we could. I thank you.

[XaulZan11]

Originally Posted by s_forbes

Then I take it our actions at our local regional will lower our potential to be picked by you at championships? That is a very sad and unintended consequence.

It would take a whole lot more for 842 (and many of the other Arizona teams) not make our pick list.

I hope my previous post didn't come off that we just care about winning and won't pick teams who don't share the same views. While I personally wouldn't have agreed to the bet, I can't fault a team for doing what is in their best interest at the time.

[iVanDuzer]

There's an underlying tone to the posters where someone says that the two alliances decided to be "GP" and play "in the spirit of coopertition." I'm sure this is not the intention, but the overall effect of these statements makes it seem as though any strategies that are NOT run-and-gun-offence-no-defence are by extension un-GP and not in the spirit of coopertition. And that's not cool for me. I've been taught from day one that coopertition is competing like crazy on the field, while helping each other off of it. It's giving your all and then shaking hands and mending bots after. It doesn't exclude defence. Furthermore, implying that playing defence is "un-GP" is wrong as well. As long as you aren't actively trying to tear robots apart, nothing your robots do on the field has any reflection on GP. Clean D is professional - I see it all the time in the NHL.

Speaking of the NHL, I don't think the original players ever thought the game would evolve strategies like the NJ Devils' famous "trap" defence that won them a bunch of Stanley Cups or the Left Wing Lock that made the Soviets a powerhouse. We are given the game, but the game is defined by how we play it. Last year the game changed drastically depending on what robots were on the field: you had cyclers and climbers and dumpers and full-court-bombers. It was a different game every match. And that was cool. Every (cleanly executed) strategy was just as much in the spirit of coopertition as the next. No one was "superior" to others, and nobody implied that the "proper" way to play the game as FIRST intended it was for every robot to climb the pyramid, or to have three cyclers, or whatever. They were just simply different ways to play the game.

Maybe I'm being too worked up over nothing. Maybe I'm being pedantic. Maybe I'm just way too tired. Or maybe everyone needs to take a deep breath and really consider what we write about each other and ourselves. Worry about the implications. This thread is a great example of what happens when we don't.

[cadandcookies]

There are multiple ways to play any game. I have to commend both alliances for playing it in a way few have dared to.

Seriously, I'd rather see a match like this one, everyone playing at the top of their game, than watching the latest Michigan or Ontario slugfest.

Good luck to the winning alliance-- I'm confident some of you will be in a position to pick the naysayers in this thread.

[Michael Corsetto]

Really glad the teams at the Arizona Regional, especially the teams in the finals, enjoyed this match. Lots of teams on the field with rich FIRST histories.

However, this Finals Match 2 is not Aerial Assist. It has a huge stipulation intertwined into the game. It is unfair to compare the results of this match to other matches where teams participated in "untainted" Aerial Assist.

On the other hand, you could argue that every regional and district event is different regardless. But every other Finals Match 2 that I've seen has played by the same rules, no strings attached.

Carry on down in Arizona! It sounds like you guys put a different twist on FIRST, which is refreshing to see! Just think twice before boasting about an artificially inflated score, might rub some people the wrong way

-Mike

[nixiebunny]

The curious thing about this match is that it featured the best robots in the regional, playing with no defense at all, and they still were not able to achieve the 200-200 minimum score for Steve Sanghi's $500 challenge.

[DampRobot]

We play to win every single match. Even if were bound to win, we don't hold back. Even if there's no way to beat the other team, we still play all out.

Why? There are so many reasons not to. Robots can get broken in hard play. Feelings can be hurt by hard defense. And sometimes, losing a match makes the tournament just a little bit easier to win due to the ranking system.

But we don't. Competing as hard as we possibly can shows our competitors that we respect them. Whether we are "supposed to" crush them, or be crushed by them, we still give it our all. If we didn't, we'd be saying that they weren't even worth trying to beat.

Perhaps you have a different idea of competition, or perhaps money is much more important to you than it is to us. I can't be in your shoes, and to be perfectly honest, I don't know your team or regional. But this is the passion we bring to the field, and we expect the same passion from everyone we compete with and against. Because if teams didn't bring it to the field, what would winning really mean?

[MrForbes]

Originally Posted by DampRobot

We play to win every single match. Even if were bound to win, we don't hold back. Even if there's no way to beat the other team, we still play all out.

Do you seriously think either alliance was not trying their hardest to win? Why do you think the score was so high?

Notice that the blue alliance did BETTER with the no defense strategy. Not only did we score a lot more points, we closed the gap a little bit.

We put everything we had into it....we didn't have enough. Exactly the same effort that we put into the first finals match. Everything.