Seeding System

[cheri0627]

Originally Posted by 10intheCrunch

While GP is certainly important to the whole FIRST idea, I think basing the seedings off of the opponents' scores strays a bit from professionalism. Professionals play fair and respect their opponents, but they still play to win. Scoring points for your opponent to increase your own score seems selfish and patronizing--you are telling the other team their best efforts aren't good enough.

You want to win, but you also want the alliance you beat to do very well point wise. I don't think it was to get people to score points for the other alliance. I think part of this may have been to keep teams from designing strategies which prevent the other alliance from scoring. If you want to rank high, is it a good strategy to block your opponent's ball corals with the mobile goals or your robot? There have not been many undefeated teams at the end of the qualification matches, so most teams are relying on ranking points to help position.

Last year, I saw a lot of matches where one alliance would completely clear the other side of the field. I think this point system was to help eliminate that, and I think it works pretty well.

[ngreen]

Originally Posted by cheri0627

You want to win, but you also want the alliance you beat to do very well point wise. I don't think it was to get people to score points for the other alliance. I think part of this may have been to keep teams from designing strategies which prevent the other alliance from scoring. If you want to rank high, is it a good strategy to block your opponent's ball corals with the mobile goals or your robot? There have not been many undefeated teams at the end of the qualification matches, so most teams are relying on ranking points to help position.

Last year, I saw a lot of matches where one alliance would completely clear the other side of the field. I think this point system was to help eliminate that, and I think it works pretty well.

Last year if they were clearing the opponents field during qualifying rounds that alliance had horrible strategy. The only times this played effect were in elimination rounds where the winning team from the first round could nearly gurantee victory by limiting the score (aka clearing both zone and leaving as few as possible robots on top).

There are several reasons for the new scoring system and why I like it:

1. It make the competition one game. Qualifying and elimination matches generally play out the same. No more all for QPs at the sake of win-losses and switch to all win-loss at elims.

2. It adds a certain tradeoff between winning with low QPs and taking the risk of losing once and being done or having high QP matches and taking more risk in losing high scoring close matches, more than a couple and your done. The scoring system in FIRST is about complexities that make strategy fun while being easy as possible for an audience to understand. The QPs being the opponents score offers this dimension to the game and as a strategist I love it.

3. It make co-opertition happen. You want your opponent in good shape so you'll do well.

4. Win-loss makes the game exciting. Being able to score only on five-point intervals makes every score closer and ties more likely and the game more exciting to watch. What I'm trying to say is that this game is so exciting in part because the scoring creates these close and exciting finishes.

These are just a few among many reasons why this scoring system is great this year. At least in my opinion.