Scoring For Your Opponents

[Jaine Perotti]

I think boosting your rank like this is very unfair. Is it legitimate? sure. But fair? no.

I honestly can't see why scoring for the other alliance can be interpreted as unfair. Scoring for your alliance partners has several benefits for both teams involved:

1) The winner of the match gets their ranking points increased.
2) The loser of the match gets their ranking points increased.

The way I see it, there is nothing un-GP about helping to raise the ranking points of the losing team. I think this shows a great deal more sportsmanship than if you were to completely shut down the opposing alliance.

That's not fair to the team's who truly WORKED to just pull out of a match and win by a single point.

Saying that this is not fair to the teams who "worked" to win a match does not make sense to me. It takes just as much "work" to score for your opponent as it does to score for yourself. Scoring for your opponent shows that you are competent strategists who have "worked" very hard to come up with a good game plan. Claiming that teams who score for their opponent don't "work as hard" as other teams, AND using this as further justification for the "unfairness" of scoring for the opponent - simply does not make much sense to me.

I believe that this is a legitimate game strategy. My team did this several times at the UTC New England Regional. No one approached us afterwards saying that this offended them.

It's not gracious. It's not professional. It's just plain insulting and rude.

If you're so bent on winning that you do that, then FIRST is not for you.

How does scoring for your opponent mean that you are "bent on winning"? If a team were so crudely "bent on winning", then I think they would be trying to completely shut down the opponsing the alliance, rather than help them by increasing their ranking points.

Far too often, people take occurrences on the playing field in much too personal a manner. In my team's case (and in many others), scoring for our opponent was never done to make them feel bad about their team's performance. The only reason we did this was to increase our ranking points. I don't see any legitimate reason for teams to see this as unfair - the only thing it does to them is increase their own ranking points.

If this happens to your team, don't take it so personally. It does not mean that your alliance parters think your robot is trash. You could have done poorly because you were having problems with your robot, or were placed on a not-so-hot alliance. Be glad that your opponents had the forethought and professionalism to make the loss not as hard on both your and their ranking points.

-- Jaine