"Random" match Schedules

[burkey_turkey]

Originally Posted by Richard

seeding is meaningless, scouting should determine your alliance selection for eliminations.

yes, i agree that of course the seeding doesnt reflect the actual rank of the robots acurately and scouting should determine who goes in the alliances, but the ranking does determine who gets to choose the alliances. Because there are some teams out there, i will not name any specifically but we all know about them, who just build a boxbot and run around doing alot of nothing, they will have a team that always plays them and always wins because they are basically playing 3 v 2. even if the robot isn't that great, it wins every match and gets placed up top where it is made to choose an alliance. this robot might not be one of the best 24 teams and might not be worthy of its spot.

One other thing relating the perpetual opponents to alliance captains is, it is impossible for both teams to be alliance captains. Your record is the inverse of your perpetual opponents record. you cannot possibly both be alliance partners, which is unfair to two really great and worthy teams who just so happen to be numerically close.

my team, we play every match against the same team. the bad thing is that the one downside of our robot is its traction. we have omniwheels and they arent gripping well. all of our opponents mechanisms arent functional so they have to focus on defense. we keep getting alliance partners that cant tube like we can so our opponent just slams us every time we pick up a tube. by the 5th match however, they received a yellow card (if not the first at the regional then definitely the second) for excessive violence. now we play an unagressive/paranoid partner for the rest of the matches which is too much in our advantage in my opinion.

while i see what FIRST is trying to do, i really think that a purely random schedule would be the best, getting paired with whoever you get paired with, assuring the variety you expect.

[Kevin Sevcik]

I'll have to agree with Karthik. The seeding is very important for ranking atleast the top 8 teams. A veteran #2 seed that has played and beaten all the other veteran teams at the regional with a rookie #1 seed that has barely beaten all the other rookies at the regional... That's just asking for trouble.

In addition, I can't see how a rookie team would prefer to be paired with and against other rookies for an entire regional. Many of these rookies were planning on being enabling robots to leverage the ramps and other features of veteran teams. Basically telling them that they'll never be paired with a veteran team just because is not a nice thing to do.

Mostly, I'm just surprised because the only serious complaints I've ever heard about the alliance pairing algorithms were that teams had to play with or against another team for half a regional or so. I can't really understand why first would turn around and go with a system like this in the face of that feedback.

[Covey41]

All this discussion about Richards idea that this type of seeding rounds was a new approach by FIRST to level the playing, or that this was planned by FIRST, is simply wrong. When this happened at the scrimmage in Suffield, CT 2 weeks ago, it was discussed with 3 high level people from FIRST.They all agreed that what happen that day, and whats happening this weekend, would be corrected by the 1st week events. With all the other fixes that came out of the scrimmage, I guess they ran out of time.

By continuing this line of discussion you are giving FIRST, and the software people an excuse for not fixing something that needs fixing.

Has anyone else notice that Mr Lavery his not added his voice to this discussion. Last year he was all over Hatch for every little issue.

[Jack Jones]

I don’t think they should even try to fix it. Why should the first week teams have to be the guinea pigs? Why should teams attending only the first week events end up having a less rewarding experience than ones who picked week four or five? This is an issue that could have been resolved way before the first event. I’m reminded of last year’s first week debacle with the scoring system and automatic scoring hardware. Not much changed in five weeks. Milwaukee probably had as many or more re-starts than VCU. They were still human counting in Las Vegas. It was not until the Championship that they programmed a break after autonomous - so they could at least get the autonomous winner right! Not much changed, except that we learned to live with it and made the best of it.

But last year had a really great game to make up for the warts. IMO, this year’s game is not as good, not even close. Whether the total experience is enough to make up for [insert pet peeve(s) here] remains to bee seen.

[Cuog]

The biggest problem I see with the perpetual opponent is simply the issue of an actually enemy appearing. In previous years there have been slight rivalries etc but by having a team that you play over and over ruins the atmosphere that we, or at least I love about FIRST regionals, a team could be your enemy one round then your ally the next. Without that I think teams can begin to get bitter towards each other, and whatever team ends up playing the number one team every match ends up being last just because of that it really adds too much negative competition into the game.

[Michael Hill]

St. Louis:

1646 vs. 1098 7 times in a row out of 9

[Idaman323]

Well, I definatly noticed this. Being on the loosing alliance about 5 times in a row is not fun... Dropped from 8th to 39th. But... it's over, only one more match left before we go home. Unless of course we are in the finals... but 39th is not good when other teams are scouting.. BUT, not much you can do.

Hopefully they will maybe do something about this for the next weeks to come. Just gotta say... right now, in my eyes, those ranks are pretty inaccurate.

GOOD LUCK TO EVERYBODY TOMORROW!!!!!!

[AdamHeard]

I hope this gets fixed by next week....

otherwise we will be up against 254 or 330 every match!!!!

[Bongle]

Wow, I came into this thread expecting similar gripes of "ooo, our (n+1)th match had somewhat similar robots as our nth match" as there was last year, but this is horrible if teams are really getting 60%+ matches against the same teams.

In past years it was always kinda like

match 1: paired with team x
match 2: playing against team x
match 3: playing after a match that had team x

Teams would kind of 'fade in' to your matches over the course of the day, then 'fade out'.

The worst part is that this isn't even something that could possibly be called an unforeseen bug, since you can always just generate test regionals with dummy teams and see if the results are sane.

I suppose one upside is that if everyone is playing their own little sub-regional with the same subset of the robots AT that regional, then finals will more closely resemble finals at the championship: you'll be playing against robots you've never played against before, and scouting is that much more important.

[sanddrag]

I've said something similar to the following before, I'll say it again.

We are customers of FIRST.

And, I'm not sure the service FIRST is providing with this method of pairups is what the customers ordered.

I'm hoping for much more varied pairups for week two.

[gblake]

Without formally polling them, I am confident that "my" team (1885 at VCU) as a whole strongly dislikes the current approach to assigning teams to matches.

When I had to set-up match pairings recent for a Potomac Vex League scrimmage, I sweated my way through this subject for one long night and came up with a handcrafted schedule that spread things out evenly in time; and ensured that over 6 rounds, no team ever faced the same pair of opponents and never had the same ally. Once I did this for my 20 hypothetical teams, I randomly assigned the 20 real team numbers to the hyothetical teams and was done.

It was tedious to do this for the twenty teams coming to that scrimmage, and out of ignorance I probably made the job harder than it needed to be, but (here comes the punch line of this part of this message) I absolutely know that I could automate the process; and that it will not be all that hard to generalize and automate my process (or a better one).

So.... By the time we get to the Las Vegas Regional, I certainly hope that this week's experiment is in the dustbin of history. I hope that FIRST chooses to go back to something that is blind to any prejudices about team age or ability needing to be factored into the scheduling method.

I say this because I am willing to trust that over a 6 to 8 match set of regional qualifying rounds a regoinal's participants can get an accurate-enough assessment of team abilities to be confident that the highly seeded teams are generally where they should be and that all the teams have generally gotten an adequate opportunity to strut their stuff.

Blake
PS: Perhaps the story within the story here is this question... Should the match scheduling algorithm (described in layman's terms) be part of the published rules, so that we can all point out that discontent is high before the season's matches start?

[Lifelessimp]

In my opinion, this schedule kind of sucks. We've had to play 114 (Los Altos) the whole day (6/6 matches), which isn't terrible, but it's nice to get to play against a lot more robots. At the same time, we haven't gotten to play on the same side as 114. Not to take anything away from 114, but our robot has had a lot of problems, which may have inflated 114's score to some degree. Basically, when you have these perpetual opponents, you don't get an accurate measurement of how good a robot is. Instead, you get a composite of how good your robot is plus how bad the other team's robot is.

[burkey_turkey]

Originally Posted by Jack Jones

Why should teams attending only the first week events end up having a less rewarding experience than ones who picked week four or five?

I personally think instead of having a 'if i cant have it nobody can' attitude one should have a 'well, at least everyone else will have fun' attitude. The people in the first week got the short straw, yes. but this cannot be changed; it already happened. i would hope that first will learn from its mistake immediately and try and make it so everyone else has the best experiance they can.

[Jack Jones]

Originally Posted by burkey_turkey

I personally think instead of having a 'if i cant have it nobody can' attitude one should have a 'well, at least everyone else will have fun' attitude. The people in the first week got the short straw, yes. but this cannot be changed; it already happened. i would hope that first will learn from its mistake immediately and try and make it so everyone else has the best experiance they can.

You sir, are putting attitudes in my mouth.

[JackN]

This is something that I think should really change. I don't want to sound like I'm whining, but this happened to team 494 at Milwaukee last season when we had to play 111 in several of our matches (6-7 in qualifying), it was not that we don't love playing against WildStang, more we just hate losing to them every round. Really my point is that it is fun to play against/with great teams every once in a while, but I would much rather play with several different teams so we can rekindle friendships and create new ones.

It scares me at Great Lakes, because I know we will be put against 469 and 503 in every single match we play. This would probably lead to me quiting FIRST and hiding in a hole to cry the pain of losing all these matches away. And yes I'm being sarcastic