Buyers' remorse / Pig in a poke

[Jon Stratis]

Originally Posted by compwiztobe

Last year, many teams did not have any hanging or consistent frisbee scoring working by the Duluth event, not to mention very few consistent auto modes. Hanging consistently every match was a solid 50 points and no hanging and just a few frisbees made that hard to beat. By Week 5, there were several teams that had cycling more refined and could put up closer to 70 points with frisbees alone (plus auto!). By the end of the season, the more refined cycling strategies proved more capable than a dedicated climbing strategy. Like you said, you chose a strategy that unfortunately did not pan out at higher levels.

However, this year, the dominant strategy is undoubtedly to get at least one assist and consistently truss and score for 10, along side a consistent auto mode. While in Duluth, the rankings reflected this very well, with the best robots all in the top 8, at North Star, the 5 best robots were scattered across the top 30, with the third best machine (by my judgment), 3883, all the way down at 29. This was not because they chose a strategy that lost its effectiveness as the season progressed. This was because they played against literally every other good robot at the event, and never with one of them. 3928 was stuck at 12 and had no choice but to accept the number 2 seed, 4244, a box on wheels that never touched a ball once in their two quarterfinal matches. North Star also had several upsets in elims, while Duluth had none (the blue alliance won a single elimination match). All of this corresponds very neatly with my observation of the reffing and field reset quality at both events, as well as with the strength of schedule of all teams in question. Maybe you could say that the refs made drawing fouls and not having field faults a more competitive strategy at North Star, so the dominant strategy I'm talking about was no longer effective. But I think that would make a lot of people pretty unhappy, and I think that's what this whole conversation is about...

So it's a little rough to tell people to just "Deal with it" when they clearly have been and they clearly should not have to.

Go watch some videos from 2013 Lake Superior, and then try and tell me the seeding was because the nature of the game changed - there were plenty of matches we won where our robot climbing had absolutely nothing to do with it because we screwed up on getting set up for the climb. We were carried in those matches and ranked much better than we really deserved, based purely on robot performance.