(Seemingly) Irrational alliance selection decisions?

[fargus111111111]

Originally Posted by Zac

This is also important to notice while scouting. I saw several instances this past season where a robot would cross several defenses, and get the check marks on the scouting sheets, but in doing so that robot cut off an alliance member, then crashed into the other alliance member causing them to miss a shot. Performing well while causing your alliance partners to perform poorly isn't an easy thing to quantify on a scouting sheet, and often dent make its way into the notes section.

~Zac

This is a very difficult thing to quantify and even notice, but it is something that 343 started to take note of on our scouting sheet this year. We made a row on our scouting sheet that rated the "quality of driving" from "professional" to "very drunk and lost" as much as this is subject to objectivity, making it a row on the sheet drew some attention to it and if a robot was marked "very drunk and lost" they were lowered in our rankings, if they were marked above about halfway on the scale (which was a 1-10 iirc) we didn't pay much attention to that row. I think that even though the an actual number may not really be that helpful, just having a place to give the driving quality a grade makes scouters notice it more. Kind of on the same note I plan to suggest a table to replace this row for the 2017 season that has speed on the x axis and accuracy on the y so we can get a better, more complete, though still objective, answer to what we wanted to know, which was, "how good are this team's drivers?"

As far as seemingly irrational decisions, most of them are due to poor scouting, certainly sometimes a team ranks high on luck and thus are picked or, I have been in this situation, where a team is picked because they have an old team number, so they must be good, right, but I have seen a few (very few) that were the result of very good scouting and those alliances, though they seem to be a very rag-tag bunch manage to do very well because they work well together and complement each other.