A comment about alliance selection in off season events

[EricH]

Originally Posted by themccannman

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.

Note: Not all of the teams that had two robots were powerhouses. Matter of fact, only two (or three, counting Saturday) would normally be considered even close. (A third/fourth team is in some years and is not in other years.) And of those teams, at least two had distinct differences between the A and the B robots. (One B team just so happened to be running BETA hardware, for example.)

The equivalence is this: It's something that many people disagree with, that is a valid play under event rules. Therefore, if someone is complaining, they really have no solid footing other than "I think it's not fair". OK, you don't like it, we get it. But we happen to have our own opinion. In this case, event rules happen to differ from FRC rules. You don't like it, but the event organizers chose to allow it, so it's perfectly valid, regardless of whether you like it or not.

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.

And the other example of a "solid footing" that I mentioned above is "It's not GP". And, different teams have different agendas for offseasons. Obviously, yours differs a little bit from the teams that were there. I can't speak for them as to why they picked their twins but as alliance captains, they can pick any team that isn't already picked.

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.

I also specifically stated that I was NOT serious in my second paragraph. Therefore, that's not a safe assumption to make, unless of course you happen to not have read that far. (Which people have been known to do, but I'm thinking that's not the case here.) And the response was not "do it better yourself", it was "come down here and give us a hand with a lack of teams if you want to comment". As I specifically noted, 1678's HP coach would have been especially welcome due to mass human player foulage.