Buyers' remorse / Pig in a poke

[PayneTrain]

Originally Posted by magnets

I do agree that the game concept is not awful.

Most years, the elite teams could, by themselves, win most qualification matches. There were so many 2012 robots that couldn't get any balls in, or had extremely low accuracy. This year, a single elite team partnered with two boxes on wheels can do nothing against an alliance of three very mediocre robots.

You're kidding, right? 2 boxes on wheels and a robot that can do nothing but pick up the ball can still turn out 31 point cycles. Put a launcher on one of them and you're talking 40-50 point cycles.

I don't know if anyone has noticed, but "elite teams" like 254, 118, et al are still winning regionals. 118 cleaned up in Alamo and I can tell you as someone who went there only 10-15 robots could even play the game. When I mean "play the game", I'm telling you our scouting meeting eliminated 32 of the 64 teams on Friday night because the robots could not move, had repeated no-shows, or demonstrated a lack of understanding how the game is played. 422 is not an elite team, which is why we went 5-5 in quals. 118 is an elite team, which is why they went undefeated. As a drive coach who personally worked with them, their robot is a well engineered machine, but what really mattered was the collection and execution of data from the competition.

Please go look at results of regionals. Elite teams are still winning regionals.

People who have giant issues with the core tenets of the game are people who refuse to accept that some games do not cater to their teams. I don't think it's breaking news to anyone that this is the most fundamentally unique game in the 3v3 era, if not ever. And because it is unique and because of the turnaround for FRC games, there are blemishes. This is not an inherently bad game. The core of Aerial Assist is the part that is very well received. In both surveys I turned in, I marked the game as "very good" but detailed out what everyone already knows: the administering of the game is damaging to its potential and transitively the potential of teams that play it.

I'm mostly concerned that FRC is going to take feedback from the wrong people: those who fail to understand the difference between the game achieving its core objectives and the game functioning at its correct capacity. I think FRC's GDC has earned another shot at trying a game like Aerial Assist next year instead of reverting back to more traditional games.

The ranking system has been and will continue to be at least a litte screwy, and this year's ranking system ranks somewhere behind Ultimate Ascent's pretty good sort and far ahead of the comedy that was 2012 and 2010 sorting.