Alliance Request

[jajabinx124]

Originally Posted by Aura_

Thanks, but when we get constant horrible match ups how are we suppose to advertise ourselves any better?

Winning in quals isn't everything. Good teams, regardless of whether you win or lose in quals, will scout your robot based on your individual performance. You can only advertise to a certain extent, otherwise your just get annoying as other people mentioned on this thread.

[Aura_]

Sorry guys if I am coming off as ignorant it is just our team has just gotten unlucky and ended up in the "no-man's zone" 7-12th too many times and I'm trying to find a way for us to escape this reoccurring predicament.

[Kevin Sevcik]

Originally Posted by Aura_

Sorry guys if I am coming off as ignorant it is just our team has just gotten unlucky and ended up in the "no-man's zone" 7-12th too many times and I'm trying to find a way for us to escape this reoccurring predicament.

7th means you're picking, means you'd better be scouting and have a pick list. 8th seeds don't often take home trophies, but 7ths have, and if you just make it to the finals you can always pick up a wildcard.

[Aura_]

Has anyone successfully found a method for getting out of the no man's zone??

[jijiglobe]

Originally Posted by Aura_

Has anyone successfully found a method for getting out of the no man's zone??

http://www.thebluealliance.com/team/694

Just demonstrate what you can do during your qualification matches, and you'll get picked. We did that at NYC regional and ended up winning undefeated as the 8th seed.

[Ed Law]

Over the years, I have been on both ends many times, as alliance captain/1st round pick and also as one hoping to be a second round pick. Many on this forum have already given good advice. It may be confusing about whether to advertise because sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Here is my take on it if you want to be picked by an alliance captain.

1) Do your best and don't worry about the win/loss. Good teams usually have good scouters who will pick up everything you do and your contribution each match.
2) Stick to the agreed upon strategy with your alliance partners. This is true especially if there are specific requests by the high ranked teams. Show them you can be trusted to perform tasks that they want you to do to help them get more ranking points. They will remember you.
3) Be a team player. Alliance captains like to pick teams that are easy and fun to work with.
4) Clean up your wiring. I learned this from others when we were a young team. A robot with messy wiring has a perceived higher potential of malfunction and would be difficult to trace the problem in the heat of battle in eliminations. There is much less chance you will get picked when there are other alternatives. Nobody wants to take a chance.
5) Be honest when you deal with other teams what your robot can do. Somebody who over promise and do not deliver will not get my trust or be on my pick list.
6) Play smart, make sure drive team knows the rules and minimize fouls.
7) Have somebody knowledgeable about your robot to be in the pit at all times when your robot is there. This is especially true for Saturday morning. A lot of negotiations happen Saturday morning between high ranked teams. Once it is settled on potential alliances of 1st round picks, I usually start shopping for potential second round pick based on scouting data. Often times multiple robots can fit the role that we need. It is very frustrating when you go to their pit when their robot is there and the people there cannot tell you about their robot or whether they can play a certain role. There is very little time before alliance selection and you may not get a second visit.
8) It is also important for your scouts to do their job even if you are not ranked high enough to be an alliance captain. Your scouts should be able to tell you Friday night how your robot can be best used to help an alliance win matches in eliminations. Then target those teams with robots you can best complement. Then near the end of Friday night or early Saturday morning, talk to those teams and ask them to watch your matches and tell them what to look for that your robot will demonstrate on the field. Share your scouting data that put your robot's best "wheel" forward. It may not be an attribute that those teams are collecting.
9) If you happen to have the first match Saturday morning, do not screw it up because everybody will be watching it right after the opening ceremony. I learned it the hard way.
10) Some teams have a do not pick list. You do not want to end up on too many of them.

I hope this helps.

[Hallry]

Originally Posted by CalTran

Perform to the best of your ability. You gotta learn to play the hand you're dealt. If your robot does well, scouting will pick up the rest. There's more to picking a robot than it's win-loss record.

Originally Posted by jajabinx124

Winning in quals isn't everything. Good teams, regardless of whether you win or lose in quals, will scout your robot based on your individual performance.

This. Just remember, at the Central Valley Regional in 2014, 1st seed 254 picked 973 and 2135, who were ranked 43rd and 41st, for their alliance, and won the regional. There were only 45 teams there.

[Aura_]

TBH greybots are usually a pretty safe pick no matter what.

[AllenGregoryIV]

One piece of advise that hasn't been given yet, is to build relationships with teams long before they are ever in position to pick you. It's probably the least important reason to build relationships with other teams but having friends on the teams doing the picking just means they already know you and what your team is capable of. Go to off-season events, do group demonstrations, have team socials, etc.

[jajabinx124]

I'm going to touch a bit more on advertising, our team has an excellent example of it.

At the 2014 Lake Superior regional that 2052 competed in, our team was going to get picked by the 2nd ranked team 3018. After they said they would pick us obviously we started to talk about what our alliance's second pick should be in the pits, then Team 3692 approached us and told us they had a bot that could load excellently from the HP and that our bot could pick up the ball right from their holder. We went to their pit to analyze their bot and decided we would pick them for their useful capabilities compared to other potential 2nd picks we were looking at. We ended up picking them and winning the regional.. and we absolutely would not have won it without them. If they hadn't advertised to us, it would of been highly unlikely we would of picked them.

But these cases to me are usually pretty rare, but to summarize my message do advertise if needed, but don't go overboard as I previously said.

[Arhowk]

Something worth noting is that our team recently ended first place in qualifications (similar result week 2) and such we had a ton of teams come up to us and say stuff like "our last Match was a small issue we got resolved" and random crap like that to get us to pick them. We literally threw all of that information in the garbage. Don't bother.

Since I'm a CSA my personal preference is teams that are really nice, gracious, and respectful (and fun) towards me but in the end we know what we want and we have collected enough data to know how your robot will satisfy our requirements (until we break our chain on the encoder in the first match and miscalibrate it going into the second, making a nearly unstoppable alliance get beaten by a rather rude and ungracious 8th seed alliance. Ugh)

Just be good, be nice, and don't break.

Also don't ever get stuck In a defense. That's a huge no-no.

[Aura_]

So i am getting mixed messages here am I suppose to do a little advertising or none at all?

[VacioArconte]

A small anecdote that shows how you could sell yourself:

We were high in the rankings at Utah and a team came to us to talk about their bot. They told us how they fixed some issues Friday night and if we could please watch their matches. While we didn't end up picking them, we did watch for them and I thought it was a very good way to sell themselves.

That being said, if you haven't changed anything, their scouting team probably has already made judgments on you and your lobbying probably won't have much of an impact.

Good luck!

[GreyingJay]

The hope is that the high seeding, picking teams have good scouting. They will be looking at each robot individually, regardless of whether you won or lost, and whether you were stuck with crappy partners or whether you were the crappy partner and were carried by better partners. Good scouting will see through all of that.

Our scouting this year recorded things like: what/how many defenses did you cross? How many low goals did you shoot? How many high goals? Did they go in? How long did it take to line up and shoot? Did you challenge the tower? Scale?

Note that this has nothing to do with your actual match score or win/loss, nor the performance of your alliance partners.

Then in our scouting meeting we categorized and ranked robots into several lists:
- really good offense bots (fast, consistent shooters, preferably high goal, can cycle 4-8 boulders on their own)
- really good breaching bots (fast, can get a breach RP by themselves, can go through most defenses without difficulty)
- really good defense bots (strong, fast, driver knows how to defend)

We were a pretty good breacher so when we made 5th and 6th alliance captain at our two regionals, generally we were looking for good scoring bots to complement us. We were also hoping that we might be picked as the breaching specialist by a higher seeding team, but that didn't work out - there are a lot of good breachers!

I can tell you that our drive team had things to say about which teams they really enjoyed working with, and which teams were more frustrating. This definitely influenced our pick lists. So play your hardest, but be honest, flexible, communicate with your alliance partners, and show GP at all times. A good team that's fun to work with may be more desirable than a better team that's rude and stubborn.

Here's a tip: scout your own robot. Be prepared to swallow your pride if the numbers you're seeing aren't what you hoped for. You will not win friends if you are trying to sell how great you are at shooting, but when I pull up my scouting data I see that you average 2.3 low goals per match.

Advertise only if there's something new that you think the scouts wouldn't have noted. On Saturday morning at GTRC we discovered we could open the portcullis with our mechanism. We had never touched it during quals. We told the teams that seeded higher than us, in case it was a selection factor, but kept the discovery quiet to everyone else in case opposing teams would think they could thwart us with it.

[FrankJ]

Your best ambassadors is your drive team. Especially if you are looking to be the 2nd pick. They need to demonstrate they know the rules, don't collect fouls, understand strategy of playing the game, and are team players.