Serpentine Draft

[themccannman]

The current draft method is tried and true. There's a reason why we still use it. The #1 pick in elims matters so much I can't imagine any scenario where a team would opt for a lower choosing spot. Strictly going from value added to an alliance by a robot, 1st picks are orders of magnitude more valuable than what's available for 2nd picks.

If you don't take the number one choosing spot then what's to keep the new #1 from picking you, you decline, then they pick your first pick (it's usually pretty obvious who the top 2-3 teams are at an event), they decline, then they pick your second pick, they decline, then you start getting into robots that you don't even want for a first pick. Now You've completely broken up every good alliance and no one gets any good picks since none of the top 4 can pick each other. Was that really worth getting a slightly better second pick? No it probably wasn't.

I'm not sure why you would want a lower choosing spot to get a working robot since every event I've seen as more than 24 working robots, all of which were more than adequate second picks. If your event has fewer than 24 robots that can drive across the field then I think the number one seed would have a pretty easy time winning with one good pick anyways. Robot performance tends to follow a bell curve, it doesn't just suddenly drop off after the 16th best robot. The 17th pick should be just as good as the 16th pick and often the 24th pick is still a good robot.

It seems to me that the only reason someone would pick a lower choosing spot is if they don't make very good second picks. I've been very satisfied with the pool of second picks we get to draft from every time we're first seed. The 24th pick is often a robot that's at the top of my second pick list. I've never ever had to work on a draft list where our second pick list didn't consist of robots that would love to have on our alliance. The situation may be different at districts, but in my experience we've always had a great array of robots available for second picks, and we often get our top picks because other teams over look them. Also the prevalence of teams making very poor second picks seems to support my theory that it's not the robots that are available for second pick that are the issue, it sounds like it's the pickers problem.

tl;dr - make better picks instead of complaining about the robots.