paper: Alliance Seeds and Results

[artK]

Originally Posted by AGPapa

Interesting, I've found the exact opposite thing to occur. In smaller events (like Districts), the only picks left at the end of the draft are often extremely poor while a strong lower seed can get 3 competent robots.

Someone mentioned earlier in the thread that at WVROX, three of the top four alliances lost in quarterfinals, and that there were 24 teams, on a serpentine draft. In my experience, there is usually a significant dropoff in robot quality somewhere on the back end of the serpentine draft (though this also depends on scouting abilities, more on that later), and at small events, this can spell disaster for top alliances.

On the flipside, consider the championships, with almost a hundred teams in a division, where really good teams like 971, 973, 16, 610, 1640, and 177 get picked up on the backswing of the draft (these in particular have a lot to do with scouting flukes, but good picks have been made on the back end before).

I have come to realize that for the best alliances to form, events need a) a good number of matches (to insure the best teams reach the top) and b) a good number of teams (to allow good second or third picks to form). Unfortunately, these two variables limit each other, so often events have to pick one over the other. WVROX went wrong in this respect in having only 24 teams with how ever many matches. Champs 2013 went wrong with this when they had 100 teams and only 8 matches. With the constraints in mind, the easiest way to optimize the alliances according to their rank would be to change the draft order depending on the event size.