Buyers' remorse / Pig in a poke

[Pranit T]

Originally Posted by compwiztobe

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.

Implying that blue alliance should never win because they clearly have the inferior robots. Nicely done.

You said it "so and so's machine was easily in the top 5 robots" according to your judgement. Why can't it be that they were ranked lower because maybe they DID adopt a strategy that lost its effectiveness as the season progressed. You are now simply undermining the improvements that the opposing teams could have made before or during the event. If you really think that a team can pick one strategy and stick to it from Week 1 of competition all the way thru Week 6 and Champs, I'm afraid you've got it wrong my friend.

Every team thinks they have built the best robot for the competition and to the best of their abilities, some clearly have. But that does not necessarily give you the right to openly criticize the robots that you may not be a fan of, or the game when the robots you are a fan of, don't do so well.

Now remains the question of the refs and the field reset who you have now called out in two separate posts. A lot has been put on the shoulders of these volunteers, as it usually has, and they are trying to do the best they can to make sure the event and the matches run smoothly and in a fair manner. If you are so concerned with the level at which the calls are being made or how the game pieces are being handled, try putting yourself in their shoes and see how it is from "that" side of the field.

And bringing up another point, think of going to an event with an odd number of teams. There will be teams playing "surrogate" matches, and even these teams are decided at random. So you keep your fingers crossed that the team you're partnered with moves, can pick up a ball, pass it, play defense effectively while they don't have the ball, and do this repeatedly over the duration of a match. Match schedules are designed to maximize the number of teams you face at an event. There is a reason match making is random as it gives each of the teams the same chance to face the others.

You really cant rant about you getting the short end of the stick in a randomized draw. Thus, deal with it.