A comment about alliance selection in off season events

[themccannman]

Originally Posted by EricH

I believe a close analogy would be the "scorched earth" debate,

I don't see the equivalence. Teams choose to decline when they are picked, they don't choose to not get picked. There's a reason that FRC only allows each team to bring one robot to an event. Having a powerhouse teams build 2 clones of their robot then proceed to pick both of them and steamroll the competition is fun for no one and directly opposes the idea of cooperative competition, instead it is only competition.

As you stated in a post of your own, seeing a teams A robot, and B robot face off in elims is great to see, we all agree on that. The concern that he is expressing is not that these teams have 3 robots in elims, the concern is that these robots are all ending up on the same alliance instead of pairing up with other teams and cooperating with teams that aren't their own.

I think this is a perfectly valid concern, it's somewhat of an unspoken rule that picking your own team isn't the most GP thing to do. Offseason competitions are not about winning, they are about giving teams experience, and the best way for new teams to gain experience is to play with veteran teams, not against them.

I guess some folks can't tell the difference between someone being angry and someone being sarcastic, even when the "sarcasm tags" are in use.

You specifically said you were serious in your first paragraph. I think he was safe in assuming that you were in fact serious. When someone discusses improvements you can make "then do it better yourself" isn't often seen as the most friendly, or mature response.