Official FIRST Stronghold Teaser!

[PayneTrain]

Originally Posted by EricH

He even stepped away from doing the animations (side note: Bring Back Dozer!) as of last year.

You couldn't tell

you could tell

[MechEng83]

Originally Posted by EricH

He even stepped away from doing the animations (side note: Bring Back Dozer!)

The story I got from Frank was that Dave not doing the animation last year was a decision based on timing due to the broadcast schedule -- not based on pushing him out or him "stepping away"

[mwmac]

My take on the teaser: Medieval theme + Historical context (1066 + 950 years) ->Battle of Hastings fought on a field with natural obstacles (bounded by marsh on one side and woods on the other) resulting in a decisive victory by William the Conqueror whose forces took the high ground, slew Harold and captured his standard. William solidified his victory and control by instituting a major castle/stronghold building policy.

Takeaways: Hopefully a return to W-L-T scoring (difficult to see how an average score would work in a capture the flag type setting and they do not call him William the nice guy); defensive and offensive roles for robots; a playing field with challenging or movement restricting terrain features.

[Doug Frisk]

Originally Posted by mwmac

My take on the teaser: Medieval theme + Historical context (1066 + 950 years) ->Battle of Hastings fought on a field with natural obstacles (bounded by marsh on one side and woods on the other) resulting in a decisive victory by William the Conqueror whose forces took the high ground, slew Harold and captured his standard. William solidified his victory and control by instituting a major castle/stronghold building policy.

Takeaways: Hopefully a return to W-L-T scoring (difficult to see how an average score would work in a capture the flag type setting and they do not call him William the nice guy); defensive and offensive roles for robots; a playing field with challenging or movement restricting terrain features.

I'd like to see total score/average score (with rounding to the nearest integer) and W-L-T points used as the tie breaker. Frankly, you get a better distribution using average score than you do with the W-L-T method.

[GKrotkov]

Originally Posted by DareDad

I'd like to see total score/average score (with rounding to the nearest integer) and W-L-T points used as the tie breaker. Frankly, you get a better distribution using average score than you do with the W-L-T method.

For Recycle Rush, I think that you're totally right - qualification average as the 1st order sort was one of Recycle Rush's greatest successes. If defense is permitted, though, I don't think this would quite work. Match schedule would begin to matter more, because the placement of strong defensive robots could make or break a team's rank. Also, it would hurt strategies that are perfectly valid for simply winning the game, say something like game piece starvation, or anything else that would intentionally keep both scores low, but put you on the winning side.

Furthermore, it could open up a can of worms or six, like: "we know we're outgunned in this match, but let's tell the other alliance that we will play a totally defensive match to deflate their ranking unless they let us take the win by a small margin." ...or something like that.

Of course this is all speculation. I admit, I'd expect that FIRSTliness would help us get over the "can of worms" scenarios as a community, and there may be games where that method of ranking is appropriate - say, there are no strategies that would intentionally keep both alliances at a low (or lower than possible) score. But for most FRC games that I've seen or read about, I don't think that qualification average would be the most appropriate order sort.

[Doug Frisk]

Originally Posted by GKrotkov

For Recycle Rush, I think that you're totally right - qualification average as the 1st order sort was one of Recycle Rush's greatest successes. If defense is permitted, though, I don't think this would quite work. Match schedule would begin to matter more, because the placement of strong defensive robots could make or break a team's rank. Also, it would hurt strategies that are perfectly valid for simply winning the game, say something like game piece starvation, or anything else that would intentionally keep both scores low, but put you on the winning side.

Furthermore, it could open up a can of worms or six, like: "we know we're outgunned in this match, but let's tell the other alliance that we will play a totally defensive match to deflate their ranking unless they let us take the win by a small margin." ...or something like that.

Of course this is all speculation. I admit, I'd expect that FIRSTliness would help us get over the "can of worms" scenarios as a community, and there may be games where that method of ranking is appropriate - say, there are no strategies that would intentionally keep both alliances at a low (or lower than possible) score. But for most FRC games that I've seen or read about, I don't think that qualification average would be the most appropriate order sort.

The thing is, going for a defensive strategy is a perfectly valid way to play, and in fact it gives a weak alliance something to actually attempt, don't forget that while the strong alliances qual average may not be as high as it could be, by going strictly defensive the weak alliance is probably hurting their own qual average by more.

No matter what, the best strategy for a high qualification average over a series of matches is to concentrate on getting the highest score possible in each match never to try to hold the other alliance down.

Plus, if their average is 100 and your average is 60, bringing them down isn't going to put you ahead of them, at best, you're acting on behalf of the team that has a qual average of 98.

[Zach101]

(First off my bad if I repeated any ones idea from this thread by accident). On the idea of defending your "stronghold", maybe you have to stop the opposing alliance from stealing game pieces from your side of the field(stronghold). That brings me to my main point, that instead of starting at zero points each team will get lets say 300 points and if an alliance member takes a game piece from the opposing side and brings it to yours, your alliance will get more points while the other gets less, example it is 300-300 and now you have an opposing alliances game piece on your side of the field, it is now 310-290. We haven't seen this in a FIRST game to my knowledge and it might be an interesting scenario.
There are probably loop-holes and bad parts to my idea and I will leave it to you guys to discuss that but I thought it might be an interesting concept for this coming up game.

[GeeTwo]

Originally Posted by GKrotkov

Furthermore, it could open up a can of worms or six, like: "we know we're outgunned in this match, but let's tell the other alliance that we will play a totally defensive match to deflate their ranking unless they let us take the win by a small margin." ...or something like that.

But if WLT is primary, and points scored is a tie breaker (even if it is the first), this wouldn't appeal to the dominant alliance at all; they would still do better by winning a low-scoring match than losing a high-scoring one. On the other hand, if the points are primary and WLT is secondary, I'd rather play offense and "lose" 150-100 than play defense and "win" 40-30.

[GaryVoshol]

Originally Posted by GeeTwo

But if WLT is primary, and points scored is a tie breaker (even if it is the first), this wouldn't appeal to the dominant alliance at all; they would still do better by winning a low-scoring match than losing a high-scoring one. On the other hand, if the points are primary and WLT is secondary, I'd rather play offense and "lose" 150-100 than play defense and "win" 40-30.

Wouldn't it be in teams' best interest to collude to not play any defense at all, if points scored are the primary ranking?

[Lil' Lavery]

Originally Posted by GaryVoshol

Wouldn't it be in teams' best interest to collude to not play any defense at all, if points scored are the primary ranking?

See 2003, 2010.

[sdangelo]

Originally Posted by Zach101

maybe....[i]nstead of starting at zero points each team will get lets say 300 points and if an alliance member takes a game piece from the opposing side and brings it to yours, your alliance will get more points while the other gets less, example it is 300-300 and now you have an opposing alliances game piece on your side of the field, it is now 310-290. We haven't seen this in a FIRST game to my knowledge and it might be an interesting scenario.

I think this may be the best way to do what the rest of the people on this thread are currently talking about--Qualification Average seeding in a non-alliance-separated game. This would make defense a valid strategy because, by definition, the average score of any of the (and therefore all of the) matches would be 300. So purely playing defense with equally matched alliances, where neither team scores, would still give you 300, the competition average, instead of tanking your score by giving you a 0. Throwing a match, however, wouldn't be a good strategy: losing or tying a match could bring your score up, if you had a really low score, but it would never bring you up above the average score.

[EricH]

Originally Posted by Lil' Lavery

See 2003, 2010.

And the Noodle Agreement from 2015 (before it was nixed).



If I was going to go in and do a rewrite of the seeding, I'd do it W-L-T, then the average of the score differentials from low to high, THEN average scores high-low.

[GeeTwo]

Originally Posted by EricH

And the Noodle Agreement from 2015 (before it was nixed).



If I was going to go in and do a rewrite of the seeding, I'd do it W-L-T, then the average of the score differentials from low to high, THEN average scores high-low.

So the very best you can do is to win every match by exactly one point, and (should two teams both do this) have high scores at that?

[notmattlythgoe]

Originally Posted by EricH

And the Noodle Agreement from 2015 (before it was nixed).



If I was going to go in and do a rewrite of the seeding, I'd do it W-L-T, then the average of the score differentials from low to high, THEN average scores high-low.

You now run yourself into a Breakaway situation, where it may be beneficial to score for your opponent.

[Lil' Lavery]

Originally Posted by notmattlythgoe

You now run yourself into a Breakaway situation, where it may be beneficial to score for your opponent.

Scoring for your opponent was not only beneficial, but actually encouraged for a decent chunk of FRC history. It wasn't always permitted by game mechanics (such as 2005 and 2007 where you couldn't possess the opponent's scoring objects), but for much of the alliance era, you were rewarded for your opponent having a high score. Prior to "WLT" being the first sort, the first sort in the standings was based on match scores (winning socre + 2x loser's score for winning alliance, losing score for losing alliance). This obviously encouraged high scoring matches, and particularly high losing scores. WLT sorting was first implemented in 2004, but the first tiebreaker for the next several seasons was the average loser's score in your matches. Thus, while winning was now a greater priority than high scores in qualifications, a high loser's score was encouraged. It was not uncommon to see powerhouse teams start scoring for their opponent once they had a sufficient lead (especially in 2006).