Buyers' remorse / Pig in a poke

[Anupam Goli]

Originally Posted by Oblarg

Find me a FRC game in which two immobile robots wouldn't severely harm your qualification score.

I think, if you overlook the reffing issues, this game is fantastic.

One of the fundamental problems with this game is that fate of teams is partially sealed by the random number generator. It's simply impossible to overcome bad alliance partners, especially with the assist points having such a huge impact on the game and the foul points being weighted so heavily. Take a look at this match. I'm sure there's video of it somewhere, but Red alliance barely won, and that was because of 40 foul points. The only robot that was capable of scoring at all on red alliance was us. Even with our double ball auto and 4+ single assist cycles, we could only win due to foul points because the other alliance had a robot that could move and actually hold onto the ball. 2283 easily had the highest scoring machine at Peachtree (I have data to back this up, and they were the first pick on my list), but their schedule made them go 4-4-1. How can a robot that scores 600 points by itself over the course of 9 matches only have 4 wins in qualifications? 3 words: Random Number Generator.

Yes, great teamwork is highlighted in this game, but so is the disparity between robots, and this combined with the random scheduler makes great teams have mediocre records in quals. If there's bad scouting ,these teams may even miss elims alltogether (see the 2014 palmetto regional).