(Seemingly) Irrational alliance selection decisions?

[Bluman56]

Originally Posted by Dominick Ferone

I would like to build upon this with the NYC Regional.
By the end of the first day we won all but 2 matches, the first being us and another robot having technical problem.(which we found out was caused by a bad controller) The second match was something silly, besides the point. We went back to the hotel and examined out scouting data, and we looked over all the bots. The ones that were very similar we put in a maybe pile, while our biggest concerns were people who complimented us. We did lowbar and A defenses in under a second so we needed someone to take care of B and D.

Our top picks included 3419, 694 and 5016. We went up to 3419 with the intentions of creating one of the strongest alliances in our opinions, and they informed us they were watching us. Something that hurt our chances, was up until that point we were still trying to do vision tracking and not succeeding( 694 and 1796 were in the same boat). So we wanted to prove we could shoot high and relied on our vision, instead of mounting our flashlight like 694 had. So the scouting report shows we weren't very successful with high goals.

Once we saw 694 we had to pick them, and we were initially planning on grabbing a defense bot since we assumed 5016 would get grabbed. When we they were avaliable we changed our plan to full offensive attack. I know during alliance selections 694 was hesitant about this, but in the end it helped prevail.

That and that our scouting report had a feature that told us the most optimal defense to put against the opposing alliance based a grading of success.

If you come again next year, you'll likely see the same kind of irrational picking. Apart from a few (emphasis on few) teams, NYC historically has one of the worst scouting collectives of any regional. It's really fun to observe year after year. I don't know if it's just me but there seems to be a huge disconnect between many (of course not all) NYC teams and the rest of FIRST. I sometimes wonder about how many of our teams even know of the concept of districts?

I don't mean to sidetrack the thread, I just enjoy a little quip on the NYC regional every once in a while.