A Uniquely Stronghold Moral Quandry

[FrankJ]

Preventing the opposing alliance from capturing your tower is one of the goals of the game. Also playing to win to keep the opposing alliance from gaining two ranking points is a goal of the game. The fact that it might benefit another team is immaterial. Much different scenario than keeping your alliance for capture/winning.

Team 7222 encouraging another team to less than its best is against the rules & spirit of first regardless of what the other team chooses to do. Team 7222 discussing, with another team, rather or not playing aggressive defense rather than scoring is in the other teams best interest is neither against the rules or the spirit of First. Where the line gets crossed is a healthy debate.

[gblake]

Originally Posted by FrankJ

... encouraging another team to less than its best ...

There is no such thing as a team's "best", in any absolute sense.

There is no single, universally-agreed goal in an FRC tournament, so unless local entropy takes a sudden and surprising dive during a tournament, there won't be a "best" strategy/action/tactic/etc. for each/all team(s) in a tournament to employ.

Additionally, teams' robots, drivers, scouts, pit crews, parts inventories, travel budgets, etc. are different, meaning that an approach that might give one team a high probability of achieving their goal, might be a terrible approach for another team trying to achieve that same goal in the same circumstances.

There can sometimes be unambiguous things for a specific team with a particular robot to do, once that team has chosen a goal, but even then at some point in a tournament the team usually faces a selection of paths involving plenty of unknowns.

It's all shades of gray.

Blake